- Pay for success: Clients will be given a conditional cash transfer – ‘pay the client for success’ – if they achieve agreed-upon outcomes in the following four areas: 1) Upskilling, 2) Employment, 3) Housing and 4) Finances.
- Personal budget: Clients will be given a service expenditure budget to decide on a range of social services, professional care and informal support they want to receive to help them achieve their personal outcomes. They will not be able to cash-out any unutilised funds.
Agape Seed Foundation is the implementing agency for this proposed pilot programme. The project will serve 100 women ex-offenders that the Singapore Prison Service refers to Agape, in waves of 25 per quarter. They will be served by Agape for 6 months in a ‘Women’s Sanctuary’ (3 Spooner Road) and follow-up support will be available 6 months after for a total of 1 year.
BACKGROUND
Pay For Success- ‘Pay for success’ or outcomes-based funding is a means of ‘keeping our eyes on the prize’ and can potentially encourage troubleshooting and course correction to achieve outcomes when standard means are not effective enough. However, ‘pay for success’ on its own is a blunt tool. As a broad concept, it is appealing to funders because it suggests the possibility that they do not need to pay for wasteful or ineffective activities. When used as part of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), ‘upfront funders’ take on the risks and secure a pay-out from ‘outcome funders’ only when success is achieved. This financing model brings in private sector or philanthropic money to take risks that governments may not be willing to. However, it may make little difference to the service provider operationally as they still get upfront programme funding to deliver a service.
- To fully express the potential of ‘pay for success’ might require creating a more direct ‘skin in the game’ mechanism so that parties involved are encouraged to troubleshoot, course correct and even innovate when the journey towards desired outcomes is not progressing as intended. While a ‘skin in the game’ mechanism can be applied to the service provider, it would be onerous and unfair to expect a non-profit organisation to take on financial risks; which is why SIBs even go through the trouble of creating a complicated structure to bring in upfront funders. Even then, SIBs create conditions where they are not ‘paying the service provider for success’ but instead ‘paying the upfront funder for success’. However, given that upfront funders are steps removed from the operations, they are unable to exert any meaningful and direct course corrections and can only ask for accountability from the service provider.
- A more direct ‘skin in the game’ mechanism can be created by offering to ‘pay the client for success’. This can be done using a kind of conditional cash transfer if clients achieve agreed upon outcomes. This creates an incentive for the client to take greater personal responsibility for those goals. It also offers a pathway for funders to flow some resources directly to clients instead of being channelled to potentially expensive professional services or forms of social support that clients may not need or want.
Personal Budget
- Personal budgets are a human-centred way to afford clients of social services the agency to manage their own care and support. Given how context-dependent social interventions are, clients may have strong personal preferences for certain modalities of care—therapist, caseworker, mentor, befriender, peer group etc.—as well as strong personal preferences who the carers are. However, current models of service provision do not typically offer meaningful options for clients in the mode of intervention or choice of practitioner. By recognising everyone’s preferences, personal budgets enable clients to have more agency and choice, letting them stitch together a range of services that best suit them from a menu of available options.
- Popularised in Europe, personal budgets are a form of user-centred funding that have been offered to clients from a diverse range of social care needs. For example, personal budgets have been utilised by clients with mental health problems, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities and by the elderly. Unlike traditional funding models that directly pay social service agencies, user-centred funding puts power in the hands of individual clients, giving beneficiaries more flexibility and control in determining the type of services that meets their needs best. Fostering a greater degree of choice is especially important for clients with long-term care and support needs, such as ex-offenders, as it allows beneficiaries with higher support needs to make their own arrangements to receive individualised care.
- Compared to traditional models of support, personal budgets put clients at the center of their care journey, enabling them to make informed choices that meet their own identified wellbeing needs. In this way, personal budgets recognises clients’ capacities and elevates them from having a passive role in their care to taking on an active role in managing their support needs. By involving clients as the primary stakeholder in deciding how to utilise the allocated funds to plan their care journey, personal budgets serve to promote autonomy and empowerment in clients. In addition, personal budgets have been associated with increased user satisfaction, self-esteem, competence and quality of life.
WHY DO IT?
Potential Benefits for Client
- Every client’s circumstance and preference are unique. Standardised programmes typically use a one-size-fits-all model that may not fit anyone particularly well. Paying the clients for success encourages desirable behaviours that clients may otherwise under invest in. Personal budget puts choice and control in the hands of the clients so they get to select what works for them.
Potential Benefits for Funders and Policymakers
- From a policy point of view, this model of service delivery can create more efficient service utilisation, as clients now have the freedom to forgo services they do not want and access only those they find meaningfully helpful.
- From a research point of view, the data on utilisation of mode of intervention and choice of provider will be useful for understanding what profiles of clients prefer what kinds of interventions.
Potential Benefits for Funders and Policymakers
- Helps bring in a larger and diverse network of service providers with different expertise to help clients, rather than have one agency do all on their own. This reduces the unwarranted burden of support on any single agency, and each can focus on delivering the intervention they have unique strengths in.
- Organisations with effective networks such as Agape can also start to play a stronger intermediary role in the sector, moving from being a service provider to bridge-builder that acts as a platform for collaboration, tapping into the strengths and unique capabilities of a wider group of providers.
- The ‘choose your own adventure’ format also lends itself well to utilising game design principles or behavioural insights to encourage positive behaviour.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR PARTNERSHIP
- Funders who would like to co-fund the pilot, especially the pay-for-success component of the project.
- Service providers who would like to offer an intervention to be included in the menu of services for clients to select from. We welcome non-profit and private providers but will determine what is broadly suitable for the project.