The GPL was profiled in the Harvard Kennedy School alumni magazine. The piece describes how the GPL grew from a small team pioneering Pay for Success to an organization of 45 undertaking projects to improve core government operations. Read the complete feature here, and download the PDF...
In a post for Government Executive, Patrick Lester discusses early lessons learned from What Works Cities engagements, including the GPL's project in Seattle to restructure homelessness services contracts. Read more.
Charting the Course: Reflections on the South Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership Pay for Success Pilot is a brief about GPL's Nurse Family Partnership Pay for Success project in South Carolina. It provides background on the purpose of including a pilot for this project, the “lessons learned” from the pilot, and why incorporating a pilot can improve the launch and operations of complex Pay for Success projects. Read the full brief... Read more about Social Finance: Reflections on the South Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership Pay for Success Pilot
J-PAL is the evaluator for GPL's Nurse Family Partnership Pay for Success project in South Carolina. Results and policy lessons are forthcoming (as of September 2020) and can be viewed at this...
Rebalancing the mix of services and programs provided to 40,000 individuals to reduce recidivism, improve sentence credit access, and reduce the overall prison population
Posting procurement data publicly is a powerful tool for governments looking to transform their procurement processes. In this workshop we will explore how the principles of the open data movement—which aims to make government data available to the public, free of charge, with no restrictions on use, and easy to access—apply to procurement data, including questions...
Is it possible that your jurisdiction’s approach to IT procurement – like the technology itself – needs a refresh? While IT spending continues to rise every year as governments prioritize cybersecurity, data...
Much like the private sector, many governments have begun to integrate environmental, social, and governance considerations into all their functions, and procurement is no...
Diagnosing bottlenecks in the procurement process, understanding where contract outcomes can be improved, and prioritizing systemic challenges require the kind of clarity provided by data. Procurement data is foundational to running an efficient, effective, proactive, and strategic purchasing...
Last year alone, state and local governments were estimated to have spent nearly $120 billion on information technology (IT), much of which was purchased from the private sector in the form of software subscriptions and maintenance, systems integration, infrastructure, and managed services...
Last year alone, state and local governments were estimated to have spent nearly $120 billion on information technology (IT), much of which was purchased from the private sector in the form of software subscriptions and maintenance, systems integration, infrastructure, and managed services...
The GPL worked with DCYF on strategic planning to assess service needs and design an approach for improving services for children and families, executing a results-driven procurement for a new set of service contracts, strengthening their contract and provider performance management practices, and designing a strategic procurement management system to improve the results of contracted spending throughout the agency.
Although the number of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle has risen over the past few years in part due to structural factors such as housing affordability and inadequate mental healthcare, the city’s increased spending on homeless services has had a limited impact on the problem. The city of Seattle held a conglomeration of contracts with service providers, but it renewed almost any contract that complied with requirements and rarely evaluated the effectiveness of the services themselves. The GPL worked with Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) to...
As in many states, Black and Native children in Washington are overrepresented in the child protective system. To reduce these disparities, the Government Performance Lab (GPL) is working with the Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families (DCYF) to provide more culturally specific and responsive services for Black and Native families. With the GPL’s support, DCYF is developing and testing promising practices to procure culturally responsive programs and contract with providers serving local Black and Native communities. These new contracting practices have the...
Michigan sought to expand prenatal and postpartum support in order to reduce the likelihood of negative health outcomes for new mothers and their children. With pro bono technical assistance from the GPL, Kent County is expanding comprehensive nurse home visiting services to every Medicaid-eligible, first-time mother to provide prenatal care, breastfeeding support, parenting and life skills-building, and additional services as needed. Assessed by a rigorous evaluation, the program is helping to reduce preterm births and rapid repeat pregnancies for new moms.
In 2012, Massachusetts was home to 1,200 chronically homeless individuals, who were among the highest utilizers of expensive emergency services such as shelter, hospital, and jail beds. To better serve this population, the Massachusetts Supportive Housing Pay for Success project aimed to shift spending on homelessness away from temporary shelters towards permanent supportive housing. The GPL worked with project partners to remove funding barriers, allowing for the establishment of 500 housing units across the state and greater access to wraparound,...
Striving to lower rates of preterm births and child injuries, the South Carolina Nurse-Family Partnership aims to give new moms the care they need to have healthy pregnancies and babies. The GPL worked with South Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services (SCDHHS) to provide nurse home visiting services to 4,000 low-income, first-time mothers from the second trimester of their pregnancy until their child’s second birthday. The model incentivizes NFP to focus on enrolling mothers from low-income zip codes, reducing child injuries and pre-term births, and increasing healthy birth...
To address a skills gap among the workforce, the State of Rhode Island rolled out a $14 million workforce development program called Real Jobs Rhode Island to help ensure that demand for talented workers was met across growing industries. The GPL helped Rhode Island's Department of Labor and Training develop a rigorous strategy for data collection and performance management of its new job programs, streamline intake procedures by eliminating burdensome application processes, and pilot collaborative, high-frequency meetings with program...
Between 2011 and 2017, homelessness in Los Angeles had increased 75% to an estimated 55,000. To combat this epidemic, voters in the region passed Measure H and Proposition HHH, which will provide $1.2 billion in bond revenue for new housing for the homeless and $355 million annually in sales tax revenue for homeless services such as diversion/prevention, interim housing...
As part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, the GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help Wichita reform its solicitations for grounds maintenance and landscaping services to improve the quality of City parks while reducing costs.
Wichita aimed to improve the quality of the city’s parks while reducing costs. In 2015, grounds maintenance bid amounts were up 30 percent over the prior year, contractors were failing to meet parks inspectors’ quality standards, and Wichita City officials had received numerous complaints about the...
The Boston Public Works Department’s contracts for road resurfacing were overly focused on achieving mileage targets to the detriment of other key goals, such as maintaining steady work flows and minimizing inconvenience to constituents. With pro-bono technical assistance from the GPL, the city incorporated results-driven contracting strategies to reorient the roadway resurfacing contracts around a holistic set of goals, provide vendors with incentives to meet these goals, and increase the flow of performance data enabling the Department to course correct issues in real-time. The...
As part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, the GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help Boston improve its vendor diversity by contracting with more Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs).
Boston aimed to increase the racial and gender diversity of its vendors. The city established concrete vendor diversity goals and, with pro-bono technical assistance from the GPL, created a performance tracking system to monitor progress, streamline procurement practices to improve accessibility and transparency, and...
Improving workforce participation and employment outcomes for TANF employment programs through more integrated service array and active contract management
Chile’s El Mercurio featured our What Works Cities project in Santiago, where the GPL is advising the city on their landscape maintenance contracts. Read the article here, and read more about results-driven contracting here.
In a commentary published by Governing’s Better, Faster, Cheaper blog on April 18, GPL Program Director Hanna Azemati laid out eight methods for local governments to transform contracting by managing procurements more strategically. Read more.
On March 27, Governing's Better, Faster, Cheaper blog published a commentary written by GPL Program Director Hanna Azemati and Director of Research & Innovation Gloria Gong on ways to maximize the potential of the Pay for Success model with federal funding made available by the recent SIPPRA legislation. ...
