Connecticut Center for Social Innovation

The Connecticut Center for Social Innovation is known for its exploration of innovative financial models to improve social service delivery. We specialize in social impact bonds and pay for performance models, and are expanding the use of big data analytics in the social service sector.

America is at a critical point in its developmental trajectory. Instead of retaining our character as a land of freedom and opportunity for all our citizens, we are fast becoming a country brutally divided between rich and poor. Our middle class is vanishing, and poverty is growing at an alarming rate. We are rapidly becoming a country with a significant portion of our citizenry for whom the American dream is now an empty promise.

If the America we know and love is to survive, we need to reverse this trend.  Many programs have proven their ability to improve outcomes for people and communities – yet governments and providers continually struggle to find adequate funding, to reach all the people or children who could benefit, and to support innovation and true measurement of impact and results.

New models of financing social service delivery hold great promise in applying what we know to solve social problems. But these innovations require increased knowledge and ability on the part of providers, funders and the public in order to develop and to have a real impact. We need to convene the best minds available to engage in a rapid and powerful reversal of “business as usual” in the funding and delivery of our social sector services.

This mission of the Connecticut Center for Social Innovation is to study new developments in this emerging field, and to develop funding models which will attract private capital to invest in self-sustaining social service delivery. Creating a double bottom line is a worthy investment for capital markets– and one which has gone undeveloped for far too long.