Social Innovation Fund Classic 2016 Grantee Perspective

SIF CLASSIC GRANTEE PERSPECTIVE

April 4, 2016 – Evidence and Evaluation Webinar #1 

Sarah Gallagher, Director of Strategic Initiatives– Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH)

Our Program

When we started on the SIF journey, CSH was looking to develop housing solutions for the 

cohort of homeless individuals with chronic health conditions who are super utilizers of crisis 

health services. Our solution to this complex problem which we are testing through the SIF sub 

grantees in 4 distinct communities, brings together the best of what we know works in ending

homelessness with some of the most innovative solutions for improving health and lowering 

health care costs. We are bringing together supportive housing, using a housing first approach 

that helps people move directly into affordable housing and then offers voluntary services to 

support housing stability, coupled with data driven targeting to identify and engage superutilizers. Additionally, the model is underscored with the added component of care coordination, 

patient navigation, and direct linkages to primary and behavioral health care. 

Through SIF, CSH saw a rare opportunity to broaden the conversation around the integration of 

health and housing and build the business case to scale our efforts through new financing 

mechanisms available via Medicaid. The CSH SIF initiative is a five year demonstration 

program where we will house 549 individuals in this integrated model. But our true goal in 

implementing SIF is to develop a model that we can replicate across the country - to create a 

blueprint for linking mainstream housing and health resources and scale the model. 

The Value of Evaluation 

Scaling is what makes the evaluation component of SIF so crucial. Through analysis of 

administrative data, along with qualitative analysis, the evaluation will hopefully not only 

demonstrate positive impacts on individual lives but will also engage new systems, document the 

service delivery model and provide the lessons learned and policy recommendations needed to 

bring SIF to scale. 

Given CSH’s desire to have one single evaluation that captured the impact of the model as well 

as its distinctions across all four sites, we decided to design what is called a Unified Subgrantee 

Evaluation Plan. While utilizing one evaluation model allowed us to support the sub-grantees in a 

more proactive way and take some of the evaluation responsibilities off of them, it broug to light 

some key considerations that CSH needed to address around: 

 The selection of Sub grantees,

 The internal management of the SIF evaluation and

 Technical support needed by the SIF grantees.

When thinking about your capacity in each of these areas there are some questions that you 

might want to ask of your organization and your potential sub-grantees 

 Who on your staff has extensive knowledge of evaluation research designs and

implementation?
Social Innovation Fund Classic 2016 Grantee Perspective



To what extent can you support the development of evaluation plans for other

organizations or potential subgrantees

 Have you conducted an RFP process before?

Based on your responses, you may need to think about centralizing some of the evaluation 

responsibilities with-in your organization and building the capacity of your organization in the 

areas you have identified gaps. 

Understanding Organizational Capacity

At CSH we dedicated a person to over-see the evaluation. Additionally each site has a technical 

assistance liaison who works with them on-the ground to provide technical assistance around

implementation, evaluation and sustainability efforts. Also as part of your selection process, 

CSH recommends assessing the ability of each site to access the administrative and other data

you are prioritizing in your evaluation design as well as the evaluation readiness of potential 

subgrantees. This will allow you to gain an understanding of the organization’s evaluation 

capacity. 

While CSH has always prioritized evaluation in its own initiatives, the SIF allowed CSH to 

heavily invest in evaluation for the first time and to local supportive housing providers to build

their capacity to collect data and imbed evaluation in their work. For many of our sub grantees, 

this was the first time they participated in a random control trial design evaluation and it was an

opportunity to support and build their capacity in this area.

CSH took two important steps that have been crucial to its journey as a SIF intermediary: we 

contracted with an interdisciplinary team at New York University and we created an evaluation 

team to support the technical assistance with each of the sub grantees.Through SIF, each sub 

grantee received direct support in implementing the evaluation, in accessing and collecting 

administrative and client level data, and in using early findings to support both implamentation 

and scaling efforts. 

Our Program Structure 

Internally, CSH meets monthly with all staff working on the SIF to share updates, problem solve 

and coordinate across all aspects of the effort and we meet bi-weekly with the New York 

University team to ensure successful roll out of the evaluation. In this call we provide status 

updates from both CSH and NYU perspective, talk about data collection and quality assurance 

related to data and talk through the analysis and timeline. We also field site specific requests, 

coordinate on presentations and ensure that we have real time interim findings that we can 

communicate out. 

Each subgrantee had support from both the CSH technical assistance team as well as direct 

support from the New York University evaluation team through regular webinars, one on one 

calls and even an annual site visit. Our evaluation partner is also a key participant in our annual 

Sub grantee convening. This direct connection between the evaluator and the sub-grantees has 

been extremely valuable in building sub grantee investment in the evaluation.