Today the Community Advocates Public Policy Institute announced that it has been selected by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), a grantee of the Social Innovation Fund’s Pay for Success program, to assess feasibility and develop Pay for Success capacity.

“We are happy to be a part of the innovative, national movement to reform our criminal and juvenile justice system,” said Robert Cherry, director of the Public Policy Institute. “In studying the feasibility of implementing Pay for Success in Milwaukee, we hope to gain more tools to narrow racial disparities in juvenile justice and to help more of Milwaukee’s young people positively contribute to their community.”

Wisconsin is an outlier nationally in racial disparities. In the nation, Wisconsin is first for rate of black male incarceration – nearly double the national rate of 6.7%; also first for black child poverty rate and black-white disparities in labor force participation.

“Our project focuses on replicating the One Summer Plus program that was found to dramatically reduce criminal involvement among adolescents in Chicago by offering youth a combination of employment, social-emotional learning, and mentoring,” said Cherry. “Such clear outcomes, if we can replicate them in Milwaukee, are likely a good fit for a Pay for Success model of program support.”

Pay for Success is a new approach that brings together private, public and non-profit sectors to provide up-front funding to service providers. If the services provided achieve agreed-upon outcomes, the government repays the investors. If the outcomes are not achieved, the

government does not pay, allowing the public sector to receive the highest return on taxpayer investments. Seven Pay for Success programs have been piloted in the United States, in the cities and counties of Chicago, Cuyahoga County, New York City and Salt Lake County, and states including Massachusetts and New York, in the fields of juvenile justice, early childhood education, homelessness prevention and recidivism.

In addition to Milwaukee One Summer Plus, two other programs will also receive technical assistant from NCCD for up to two years. Those programs are YouthStat, a program of the City of New Haven, Connecticut; Alternatives to Detention and Placement, a program of the San Diego nonprofit the Children’s Initiative.

“NCCD strongly believes that Pay for Success creates a real possibility for sustained, positive change in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems,” said Kathy Park, acting president of NCCD. “We are proud to work with these three extremely dynamic programs to see if this innovative financing will work for them.”

“We received competitive proposals from states across the country,” said Deirdre O’Connor, senior program specialist at NCCD. “Through careful review and discussion, we selected our final three programs. We look forward to working with each to bring them one step closer to successfully implementing the Pay for Success model.”

In October, NCCD received $863,959 in investments from the Corporation for National and Community Service’s (CNCS) Social Innovation Fund (SIF). As part of the SIF’s Pay for Success Initiative, NCCD is helping strengthen the pipeline of state and local governments and service providers prepared to implement Pay for Success projects across the country.

The Social Innovation Fund and its non-federal partners have committed to investing more than $700 million in effective community solutions. NCCD’s project aims to assess feasibility and develop Pay for Success capacity in jurisdictions from the states with the highest rates of racial and ethnic disparities in these systems. NCCD released a request for proposals in December for programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, DC, and Wisconsin.

About Community Advocates Public Policy Institute

The Public Policy Institute (PPI) was founded in 2008 as a division of Community Advocates, a nonprofit serving low-income people in Milwaukee since 1976. PPI pursues its mission to prevent and reduce poverty while fostering wellness through a combination of local and national-scope work. The approach includes public health prevention work, re-granting to community-based agencies, policy research/advocacy, and a Minority Male Achievement Initiative. PPI seeks to develop evidence-based policy and prevention programs to reduce poverty, narrow disparities, and promote social justice and public health.