Sneak Preview: Mixing Funding Can Lead To Better Service Results
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) Despite requiring extensive collaboration and commitment, local and state governmental agencies have been able to provide improved services under pilot grant programs that allow them to blend and braid federal funds to boost performance outcomes, a panel of speakers told attendees at the recent AGA National Leadership Training Conference in Washington, D.C.
“Blending” is defined as mixing funding from multiple sources into one very flexible funding stream to support a common goal or initiative, and to take advantage of pooled funds having one single set of tracking, reporting and other requirements. “Braiding” refers to lacing together funding streams to support a common goal or imitative, noting that each funding stream remains a distinguishable set of funds that is tracked and connected back to its original funding source and reporting requirements.
Kathy Stack, senior fellow with the Yale University Tobin Center for Economic Policy and former policy official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), explained that state and local governments receiving funding under multiple federal programs often struggle to determine how to use these dollars to best serve constituents. “It’s very hard to find anybody at OMB or at federal agencies,” she said, “who understands the challenges that states and localities face in trying to make all of their funding streams work together, but the best way to learn is to engage directly to attack these problems and realize they are solvable if you get the right players together.”
The panel shared experiences they had pertaining to the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3) program, under which recipients can test innovative strategies to achieve significant improvements in educational, employment and other key outcomes for disconnected youth using the flexibility provided under the program. The program, approved by Congress in 2014, enables state and local government to conduct pilots that blend federal funds from multiple agencies and obtain waivers of program requirements (e.g., stemming from certain statutes, regulations, administrative policies) that are barriers to achieving improved outcomes for youth-serving programs.
Stack said the P3 program was launched after federal officials met with state officials to hear about the difficulties states faced when providing services using federal funds that are constrained by program-specific program requirements, and about concerns states had when attempting to comingle federal funds yet still comply with federal regulations. Once launched, the P3 program was reappropriated each year through federal fiscal year 2024, and certain states are still conducing pilots under the program.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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