Charitable assets: social outcomes, financial values, and the new, nonprofit funding regime

Amidst growing signs of inequality, poverty, and marginalization, there have been calls for a new approach to funding the social sector organizations tasked with addressing these challenges. Rather than paying for services, governments and philanthropists are being encouraged to fund programs based on their ‘outcomes.’ This paper explores this growing movement around ‘outcomes-based funding’ (OBF) suggesting that outcomes in this context embody a distinctly financial logic and reflect an effort to turn the work of charities and nonprofits into a type of pseudo asset. The paper teases out these dynamics and their implications based on one particular form of OBF, the social impact bond, a financial instrument which uses private capital to fund social programs and calculates returns based on program outcomes. While SIBs have struggled as a market, the operations underlying these projects and informing the production of outcomes as investable assets have been carried forward into non-SIB work informing flows of public and philanthropic capital and embodying the practices of the larger OBF ecosystem. As a window into the new, outcomes-based nonprofit funding regime, the paper offers a unique lens and set of critical tools for exploring the relationship between capital, the social sector, and poverty governance.