Chris will present a framing paper on the potential for Pay for Success (Payment by Results) to effect large scale social change at the University of Southern California’s conference on ‘Activating Markets for Social Change‘.

The annual USC Price Center conference aims to magnify the impact of social innovators by bringing them together with change leaders from around the world in a common pursuit of equality of opportunity for children and families in marginalized urban communities. Corporate, nonprofit, public sector, and foundation leaders will delve into innovative strategies for leveraging capital sufficient in scale to significantly reduce concentrated poverty and improve social mobility in marginalized communities.

This year one strand of the conference concentrates on ‘Pay for Success / Social Impact Bonds’. Social Impact Bonds are a promising new approach to government financing of social service programs. By combining performance-based payments and market discipline, pay-for-success contracts have the potential to improve results, overcome barriers to social innovation, and encourage investments in cost-saving preventive services. In his paper Chris will look at the evidence to date, with a particular focus on the UK experience.