$50 Mill Federal Grant Program: Questionable Grants & Secrecy

[amborin]

Nonprofit Fund Faces Questions About Conflicts and Selection Procedures

In late July, the Social Innovation Fund, a new $50 million federal program aimed at financing the replication of nonprofit programs that work, made its first grants.
But what was supposed to have been an emblem of the administration’s commitment to nonprofit groups has become instead a messy controversy over potential conflicts of interest and the process used to select the grantees.
Several of the 48 independent reviewers who vetted the initial 54 applications for the grants were surprised by some of the winners because they had awarded them mediocre scores.
Critics noted that the executive director of the fund, Paul Carttar, had worked at New Profit Inc., a nonprofit group that helps promising social programs. New Profit Inc. received a $5 million grant from the fund.
Similarly, Patrick Corvington, the official who oversees the Corporation for National and Community Service, where the fund resides, previously worked for a foundation that financed a program operated by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, better known as LISC. The foundation won a $4.2 million grant.

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But the fund has not disclosed who reviewed the grants — or who applied for them or the ratings the applicants received, information that often is provided by many other government agencies that make grants.
In soliciting applications, the fund published a detailed set of criteria it would use to evaluate them, but the process by which they would be vetted was unclear. Last week, it disclosed more information about the procedures, including that the applications went through four stages, as well as the number of organizations culled after each.
“The bare minimum would be to release the names of the peer reviewers, the names of the applicants and the score they each received,” said Dean Zerbe, a former tax counsel to Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has persistently scrutinized the Corporation for National and Community Service’s grants and programs.

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...reviewers, though, questioned the secrecy surrounding the selection process, particularly since it was being imposed by an administration that has pledged to greatly increase transparency.
“This is not a private, grant-making institution, it’s the federal government,” said Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who has served as a reviewer for other federal grants and contracts.

Mr. Light, who aired his concerns on Thursday in his column on the Washington Post’s Web site, said in an interview that his group of reviewers had rated one of the winning organizations as “weak and unresponsive,” the lowest rating possible. He said the application contained typos and grammatical errors, lacked data needed to assess it and proposed using a substantial amount of money to build its own capacity to administer the grant it was seeking.
“I was very concerned about the potential impact of giving an applicant the bottom rating because I believed it would be a death knell,” he said. “I got the message from our liaison with the fund that these ratings were a key input and potentially determinative.”
Yet that organization won a grant.
Two reviewers who would speak only on the condition of anonymity — the nonprofit world has its own code of silence that keeps insiders from expressing negative opinions — said that organization was New Profit, a Boston-based organization that supports a number of high-profile programs like KickStart and iMentor. Mr. Carttar, the fund’s executive director, worked for New Profit before joining the government. Ms. Urquilla said Mr. Carttar had “played no role whatsoever in the decision on any of the grantees.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/us/22nonprofit.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all