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 using social impact bonds have the potential to improve results, overcome barriers to social innovation, and encourage investments in cost-saving preventive services.
Established with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harvard Kennedy School Social Impact Bond Technical Assistance Lab (SIB Lab) conducts research on how governments can foster social innovation and improve the results they obtain with their social spending. An important part of our research model involves providing pro bono technical assistance to state and local governments implementing pay-for-success contracts using social impact bonds. Through this hands-on involvement, we gain insights into the barriers that governments face and the solutions that can overcome the barriers. By engaging current students and recent graduates in this effort, we are able to provide experiential learning as well. During the past year, the SIB Lab has helped Massachusetts and New York become the first U.S. state governments to develop pay-for-success contracts using social impact bonds. This year the SIB Lab is assisting the winners of a national competition to receive technical assistance: Chicago, Colorado/Denver, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and South Carolina.
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SIB Lab Staff
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Jeffrey Liebman, SIB Lab Director
Jeffrey Liebman is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where he teaches courses in social policy, public sector economics, and American economic policy. In his research, he studies tax and budget policy, social insurance, poverty, and income inequality. During the first two years of the Obama Administration, Liebman served at OMB, first as Executive Associate Director and Chief Economist and then as Acting Deputy Director. From 1998 to 1999, Liebman served as Special Assistant to the President for economic policy and coordinated the Clinton Administration’s Social Security reform technical working group. For the past two years, he has been providing pro bono assistance to state and local governments interested in implementing pay for success contracts using social impact bonds.
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Gloria Gong, Assistant Director
Prior to joining the SIB Lab, Gloria worked on a variety of state and national governance and legal programs. She served as the lead evaluator for the Connecticut Judicial Branch on its evaluation of its mortgage foreclosure mediation program and worked in the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care on the agency’s early education initiatives. Gloria also worked in China at the Yale China Law Center on rule of law projects in areas ranging from criminal justice to judicial reform. Gloria received her Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School, where she was a Public Policy Fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She holds a BA magna cum laude from Brigham Young University. In addition to acting as Assistant Director of the SIB Lab, Gloria also serves as the fellow for Connecticut’s SIB project.
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Hanna Azemati, Government Innovation Fellow – New York
Hanna Azemati is helping New York State with its social impact bond initiative. She completed her undergraduate studies in economics with a minor in government from Dartmouth College in 2007 and recently graduated from Yale University with an MA in International Relations. Prior to Yale, Hanna was a financial analyst at Citigroup in New York and a fellow for Kiva Microfunds in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. At Yale, she was a teaching fellow, a research assistant, and an editor of two academic journals. Hanna has also conducted independent research in Iran and Turkey and participated in a national policy workshop in Angola. Hanna was born in Iran and grew up in Germany.
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Erica Brown, Government Innovation Fellow – South Carolina
Erica Brown is helping South Carolina with its social impact bond initiative. Erica completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and recently graduated from Brown University with a Masters of Public Policy. During her time at Brown, Erica assessed the feasibility of implementing a Social Impact Bond in Rhode Island as part of her Capstone Project. Prior to joining the SIB Lab, Erica worked for The DREAM Project in Cabarete, Dominican Republic and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Kampala, Uganda.
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Ryan Gillette, Government Innovation Fellow – Chicago
Ryan Gillette is working with the Chicago Mayor’s Office to explore opportunities for a city-level Social Impact Bond project. Previously, he was a Government Innovation Fellow for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance where he led the Commonwealth’s Social Innovation Financing initiatives. Prior to his work with Administration and Finance, he worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research on the final evaluation of HUD’s Moving to Opportunity voucher study and with the federal Office of Management and Budget on healthcare cost forecasting. He holds a BA in Economics and Russian from Middlebury College and a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
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Tyler Jaeckel, Government Innovation Fellow – Colorado & Denver
Tyler Jaeckel is working in the Colorado Governor’s Office of Policy and Research and the Denver Department of Strategic Partnerships. Tyler recently received a JD from New York University Law School and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked in various levels of government, including the Office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the New York City Department of Small Business Services, the Senate Banking Committee, and the Executive Office of the President. He is originally from Colorado and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University.
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–Scott Kleiman, Government Innovation Fellow – Illinois
Scott Kleiman is assisting Illinois with its social impact bond initiative. Scott graduated in 2013 with an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where he was a Fuqua Scholar. At Duke, Scott helped found the CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing and served as its student co-chair. In 2012 Scott was as a summer associate with Bain & Company, where he analyzed infrastructure investment needs for the City of Atlanta. Prior to graduate school, Scott led strategic planning and managed the CEO’s office at Ceres, a national nonprofit organization partnering with institutional investors to advance corporate sustainability practices. He has also built pig-pens as a farmhand at an organic farm in Italy, taught cooking to teens at the youth development organization Brainfood in Washington, DC, and is a StartingBloc Fellow. Scott graduated cum laude from Middlebury College in 2006 with a BA in Political Science.
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Djibrane Larrabure, Government Innovation Fellow – Ohio
Djibrane Larrabure is assisting the State of Ohio with its social impact bond initiative. Previously, Djibrane worked as a Trade Development Officer at the Cleantech and Infrastructure Practice of the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. He also undertook various roles in trade and development at the Embassy of Peru to Canada and the United Nations Development Programme in Lima, Peru. Djibrane holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Finance and Economics from McGill University, and is a recent graduate of the M.A. program in International Relations at Yale, where he specialized in Economics, Policy and Evaluation.
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Anne White, Government Innovation Fellow – Michigan
Anne White is helping the State of Michigan with its social impact bond initiative. Prior to this endeavor, she led Ontario’s exploration project on Social Impact Bonds as advisor on government innovation and outcomes-based approaches with the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto. She holds a Masters degree in Public Policy Administration and Public Affairs from the London School of Economics and Sciences Po, Paris, as well as an undergraduate degree in Honours Business Administration from the Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Canada.
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Avi Feller, Statistician
Avi Feller is a doctoral student in the Harvard Statistics Department, where he applies statistical methods to questions of public policy. He is helping develop rigorous and robust evaluation methodologies for SIB projects. Prior to Harvard, Avi served as Special Assistant to Office of Management and Budget Directors Peter Orszag and Jack Lew and was a research associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Avi earned an MS in Applied Statistics as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford and holds a BA in Political Science and Applied Mathematics from Yale University.
SIB Lab Alumni
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Alina Sellman is an alum of the SIB Lab, where as Program Manager she was responsible for communications, recruitment and coordination of the SIB lab’s projects, including the expansion of the lab to serve several additional states. Prior to joining the SIB Lab, Alina spent three years working for the Ministry of Justice as a participant of the UK Civil Service’s ‘fast stream’ leadership development program. Alina graduated from the University of Warwick in 2008 with a BA (hons) in German and English Literature.
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Sebastian Chaskel is an alum of the SIB Lab, where he served as the Lab’s Program Manager. He has a background in social policy and programs research and implementation. He has experience ranging from foreign policy research at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to local public sector capacity building with the Cerrejón Foundation for the Institutional Strengthening in the northernmost Colombian department of La Guajira. Along the way, Sebastian has worked with Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies program, the Colombian foundation Ideas para la Paz, and the Colombian National Agency for Extreme Poverty Alleviation. He has a Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. in anthropology and international relations from Tufts University.
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Michael Belinsky is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where he helped the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance design the youth recidivism social impact bond. He currently is the Founding Partner at Instiglio, a nonprofit organization dedicated to structuring social impact bonds in developing countries. Prior to Instiglio, Michael worked at Advanced Analytical providing economic and statistical consulting to corporations and law firms. Michael holds an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School and an AB in economics and government from Dartmouth College.
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Angela Wyse is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where she helped the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance design the youth recidivism social impact bond. She is currently a Foreign Service Officer and is serving in the public affairs section of the U.S. Consulate General in Casablanca, Morocco. A former Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow, Angela holds an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in Public Policy from the University of Michigan.–
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Natalia Emanuel is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where she contributed to the Massachusetts youth recidivism and chronic homelessness pay-for-success projects, developing baseline estimates to establish what would constitute success. Since her year working at the SIB Lab, she returned to Yale, where she earned her BA in economics. She will be continuing to do economics research next year as a research assistant for Harvard Professors Katz and Goldin.
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Wayne Sandholtz is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where he provided data analysis support to the Massachusetts youth recidivism pay-for-success project. In prior work, he conducted a project evaluation for Fundación Pro Vivienda Social in Argentina and managed field experiments in Uganda and the United States. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in economics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in economics.
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Thomas Dermine is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where he analyzed opportunities to establish social impact bond opportunities in continental Europe. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Thomas worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Europe advising institutional clients and governments on financial and regulatory issues. He also interned in the Belgian Government. Currently, Thomas is coordinating a partnership composed of the Belgian Government and financial investors to launch social impact bonds on adult recidivism and workforce empowerment. Thomas holds an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, a Master’s degree in Business Economics and a BA in Economics and Political Science from the Free University of Brussels.
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Katherine Klem is an alum of the HKS SIB Lab, where she helped Massachusetts explore a third social impact bond. She is currently the Special Assistant to the Executive Director at the NYC Office of Human Capital Development. Her background is rooted in public health. Katherine founded a nonprofit organization rallying youth for socially just tobacco policies and worked in the office of Colorado Governor John W. Hickenlooper on Affordable Care Act implementation. Katherine holds an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, earned a BA with High Distinction from the University of Virginia and was named a US White House Presidential Scholar.
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Harvard Kennedy School 