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What the heck is a SIB?

Published by USC Bedrosian Center on

Conversations about governmental and social services can get pretty wonky & boring … and yet … they are often vital for making real change, particularly at the local level.

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) allow governments to take risk without footing the bill unless & until there are results. Gary Painter from the Price Center for Social Innovation joins research partners Chris Fox and Susan Baines from Manchester Metropolitan University to share findings from recent evaluations of SIBs in the wild.

Some of the recommendations for making the tool better include increasing co-creation in the design and evaluation phases. Including affected communities is vital to making policy work, to making these programs do what they can and should do.

Our goal here is to take this wonky idea of how to have more innovation in the creation, funding, and production of social services … and make it more clear. Are SIBs a way to move us from a “winner take all” society to a more egalitarian/democratic one?

Connect with our guests:

Gary Painter

Professor
Chair of the Department of Public Policy
Director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation
Director, Homelessness Policy Research Institute

Christopher Fox

Professor of Evaluation and Policy Analysis
The Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University

Susan Baines

Professor of Social Enterprise
The Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University

These conversations are available both as an audio only podcast and as videos on our YouTube playlist.

Listen or subscribe to the podcast at ApplePodcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. Don’t forget to like or share!

Thank you to our co-producers Aubrey Hicks and Jonathan Schwartz as well as our beloved sound supervisors, The Brothers Hedden. Recorded at the USC Price School.

Email us at [email protected].

Bedrosian Center