Historic Senate Vote in Favor Serve America Act

By Stacy Caldwell, Executive Director of Dallas Social Venture Partners

Last week on Capital Hill, Social Venture Partners successfully helped gain the attention of the Senate to add the National Capacity Building Act and the Social Innovation Fund to the Serve America Act. I want to alert everyone that the hard work of our social sector has paid off! Now that the senate has passed the Serve America Act, it will go back to the House to reconcile any differences and then send over to President Obama to sign into law.

These two amendments are potentially VERY important to our SVP work (see descriptions below). The Nonprofit Capacity Building Act promotes federal dollars distributed in our communities to help build non-profit capacity. These funds would be available to non-federal grantmaking organizations to match grant dollars to help build capacity in the nonprofit sector. This could be an opportunity to find matching dollars for the work we already do!

The Service Nation Coalition says it is “a historic vote in the United States Senate authorizing the Serve America Act- the largest expansion of national and community service in this country since the 1930s. The bill was passed by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 78 to 20. In addition to earning the support of the entire Democratic caucus and two Independents, the bill was also supported by a majority of the Republican caucus. What this represents, beyond broad recognition that service is a critical strategy in addressing our most pressing challenges, is the opportunity to move our country's national and community service program forward in a powerful way that is fully embraced by both parties.”

Thank you to everyone who took an interest in this work, picked up the phone, and made your voice heard.

I feel so optimistic to see a piece of legislation that puts the best we have to offer to work for our Country!

Well Done!

National Capacity Building Act
Creates an innovative $25 million fund in the budget of the Corporation for National and Community Service to make matching grants to intermediary nonprofit training and technical assistance entities. Those intermediaries will then provide organizational development assistance (training and technical assistance for capacity building) to small and midsize nonprofits, especially those in areas where nonprofits face "significant resource hardship challenges." Nonprofit intermediaries would need to secure a non-federal 50% match to be eligible for a grant. http://www.cctv.org/news/senator-baucus-introduces-nonprofit-capacity-building-act-2009-1

Social Innovation Fund
A public-private social innovation fund can leverage taxpayer dollars with private funds to make resources available for funding social-entrepreneurial solutions. Creating a fund specifically designated to advance social entrepreneurship would enable government to follow a performance-based model for investment, not unlike venture capital funds, to both seed and scale initiatives. The two related models to follow show how such a fund could work structurally and operationally.
http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/government-engagement/topics/social%20innovation%20fund