The Social Entrepreneurship @ UVA (SE@UVA) Pay for Success Lab will be supporting research in a newly announced supportive housing grant. Four applicants competing nationally won support and funding from the national housing organization, CSH, to study the feasibility of using “Pay for Success” to improve housing, healthcare and other services in Virginia, Oklahoma, Nevada and Pennsylvania. The Corporation for National and Community Service’s Social Innovation Fund contributed also resources to the grant awards.

Pay for Success financing is a new model for governments to partner with the private sector to fund evidence-based solutions. It leverages philanthropic and private dollars to fund services up front, and governments or other entities provide reimbursements to the funders after initiatives generate verified results. This strategy has gained strong bipartisan support in Congress for its ability to increase return on taxpayer dollars while improving the quality of services provided in communities.

The Richmond-based nonprofit organization Virginia Supportive Housing (VSH) received a competitive grant to study the feasibility of using Pay for Success to serve the homeless population. This grant is the first Pay for Success funding award in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Collaborative partners examining the feasibility of Pay for Success with VSH include SE@UVA’s Pay for Success Lab, Homeward, the Richmond Justice Center, Richmond FUSE Initiative, Greater Richmond Continuum of Care, the Virginia Department of Corrections, VCU Health and Bon Secours Richmond Health System.   

The competitive grant, valued at $100,000 in services and resources, includes technical expertise from the Center for Health Care Strategies, which will provide expertise in Medicaid and other public financing sources for serving vulnerable populations, and Third Sector Capital Partners, which will offer guidance on building financial modeling capacity, designing and structuring procurement processes.

VSH’s executive director Allison Bogdanović said, “Pay for Success can boost our efforts to scale these evidence-based practices through collaborations between public, private and nonprofit sectors. The financial and technical support from the grant will help develop a more outcomes-focused model to pay for the services that we provide in the Richmond area while saving public dollars.”