Realizing the Promise of a Truly Responsive Government
Deep misalignment exists between what the American people want from their government and what they believe they are getting from it. To address this problem and unlock the possibility that our government can be a true partner, genuinely responsive, and a more effective force for good in our lives, we must reorient how entire government agencies do their work and what they understand their responsibility to the communities they serve to be.
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A NEW NARRATIVE FOR OUTCOMES
BY CAROLINE WHISTLER
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MEASURING SYSTEMS CHANGE
BY ANNIE NEIMAND & ANUM ALI MOHAMMED
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PHILANTHROPY AND BETTER GOVERNMENT
BY DANIEL STID
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INNOVATING GOVERNANCE
BY RODERICK BREMBY & MISHAELA DURÁN
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RESTORING TRUST
BY KESHA LEE
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EMPOWERING PUBLIC SERVANTS
BY WILLIAM RHETT & JASON WILLI S
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GOING GLOBAL
BY KUSI HORNBERGER & TIM PENNELL
A NEW NARRATIVE FOR OUTCOMES
To fulfill the promise of government for, by, and of the people, we must radically rethink the role that government plays in our lives.
BY CAROLINE WHI STLER
Alongside a deluge of new policies, this year has seen unprecedented political discourse about the nature of government: how much we should have, how efficient it can be, and whether bureaucracy will destroy even the most well-intentioned ideas.
Federal policy changes are transforming our government’s purpose and federalist design, forcing us to grapple with what we want from government and its purpose. Many communities, dissatisfied with the status quo, want to remake how government helps to create opportunity, well-being, and safety for all.
Local government is leading this transformation and will be the epicenter of modeling our government of the future. Millions of Americans hold dim views of the federal government, but 61 percent of respondents in a 2025 Pew Research Center survey had a favorable opinion of local government. Local government continues to be a sphere of tremendous innovation, particularly in delivering measurable improvements through outcomes-focused projects. Starting locally can help reshape our understanding of what government can and cannot do.
In a healthy democracy, government is of, by, and for the people. That means that our government responds to the needs of the community it serves, especially at the state, county, and city levels. However, the way we have operationalized government is rooted in a faulty premise—that we can develop prescriptive programs in one place with one group of people to meet a specific challenge, codify them in legislation, and then simply replicate the programs everywhere to produce the same results.
People are not widgets; what they need one year may not be what they need the next. Local government should be responsive enough to local needs that residents take it for granted. People should experience
government in ways that make it feel as essential as other institutions in the community. Instead of putting up bureaucratic obstacles and asking for more paperwork, we should design local governments with systems, services, and civil servants that have the flexibility, accountability, integrated data, and trust required to support communities and to function in ways that measurably improve people’s lives.
What if you had to fill out a local government form only once, and your information was accessible—and your privacy protected—by all the agencies you interacted with?
What if we hired civil servants from the communities they serve, drawing on local knowledge and expertise, and provided them with relative freedom, data, and the capacity to make decisions that meet the needs of every person who enters their office, rather than hamstringing the process with outdated processes and traditions?
What if the purpose of your local government agency was to support healthy communities and solve problems instead of providing predetermined services—which may or may not meet real needs—prescribed by well-meaning legislators?
Such shifts would exemplify “outcomes-focused government,” an approach states, counties, and cities have experimented
with for decades. When a government agency tailors its methods to respond to community members’ voices, perspectives, and needs—especially in ways that cut across the divides of race, background, and circumstance to ensure success for all—its process is outcomes-focused.
At Third Sector, we believe that civil servants can use six levers to help ensure that state and local governments improve the lives of community members:
• Implementation-informed policymaking that links dollars to outcomes, increasing spending flexibility and accountability
• Outcomes-focused funding that reduces departmental silos and funds coordination, innovation, and continuous improvement
• Responsive services that are designed in collaboration with beneficiaries
• Integrated, disaggregated data systems that are used for continuous improvement
• Building and strengthening trustworthy external relationships that are rooted in listening and power sharing
• Outcomes-focused internal culture that elevates civil servants’ mindsets from compliance to improvements in people’s lives
An outcomes-focused model recognizes that our governments, including employees and elected officials, must become more dynamic and responsive. Toward that end, local and state governments should do the following:
1. Establish flexibility in policymaking and accountability for outcomes, such as moving away from cost-reimbursement models to milestone and outcome payments.
2. Support use of integrated data as essential to program delivery to promote understanding and continuous improvement.
3. Revise civil service job descriptions to ground requisite skills, responsibilities, and promotion pathways in outcomes management rather than compliance.
The elevation of our government’s focus on outcomes can only work if we zero in on implementation, a necessarily human part of government service delivery. We should support civil servants by setting the right incentives (via job descriptions, for instance) to help them make that shift. We should also create incentives that generate feedback loops between and among agencies and legislative bodies, reducing procedural bloat and gridlock. Aligning incentives with locally focused innovation in policymaking, funding, and services will improve our lives. A local government that supports the coal regions of Appalachia, for example, will prioritize and deliver different services from those of agencies supporting a major city such as Philadelphia or Houston.
Given its proximity to the people, local government can meet the moment and transform the public sector’s value by adopting outcomes-focused approaches. Our task in this as nonprofits, philanthropists, employers, and constituents is to help our governments make that shift and live up to that potential. Doing this work together can unlock the possibility that government can become a true partner and an effective force for good in our lives.
CAROLINE WHISTLER is cofounder and CEO of Third Sector, where she leads the organization’s work advising government agencies on effective ways to reshape their policies, systems, and services to create better outcomes for all people.
EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT SYSTEMS CHANGE— BUT HOW DO WE MEASURE IT?
We have experimented with a new approach to systems change evaluation. We have four recommendations for those who wish to take the same path.
BY ANNIE NEIMAND & ANUM ALI MOHAMMED
The work of government systems change is complex. It requires understanding historical systems built on an unjust foundation that have been repeatedly broken and put back together again through reforms to policies, practices, and funding. Our systems are also shaped by shifting cultural norms and how people think about the role of government, both inside and outside its institutions.
How do we know if our systems change work makes a difference? At Third Sector, we are committed to empowering government to deliver responsive services and achieve better outcomes for everyone, regardless of race, background, or circumstance. We do this by providing technical assistance on issues ranging from diversion and reentry to behavioral health, early childhood, postsecondary opportunities, and workforce development, together with our government partners at the state and county levels.
We work with government agencies to improve outcomes for their communities via six systems levers: data, funding, policy, services, external relationships, and internal culture. In our projects, we reimagine how an agency and its partners engage with these levers to change how systems operate.
We partnered with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, for example, to build and launch a parent and family cabinet that advises the department on critical decisions. We have worked with nine counties across California to remake their Full Service Partnership behavioral health programs to provide vital wraparound services for people most at risk of homelessness, hospitalization, and recidivism. In Oregon, we reduced rearrest rates by supporting collaborative
Systems change evaluation is an emerging practice. We had to create our own approach to understand whether the projects we contributed to delivered deeper, sustained changes within systems and communities.
partnerships between a county housing agency, the parole and probation department, and local service providers to increase access to permanent supportive housing and comprehensive services.
A common thread across our projects is an unwavering commitment to improving the lives of all people and reducing disparities. But we don’t always know to what extent our efforts have the impact we desire.
In 2024, we experimented with our first systems change evaluation. Commissioning a series of case studies, we sought to understand how our technical assistance to government partners contributes to systems change and improves community outcomes. We partnered with Cause IMPACTS, a woman-owned social impact consulting agency, to lead the evaluation as an external neutral partner and work with us to translate insights into guidance for our organization and the field.
Unlike programmatic or process evaluation, systems change evaluation is an emerging practice (although we did discover some shining examples of new approaches, including at Rotary Charities). We had to create our own approach to assess our impact and understand whether the projects we contributed to delivered not only the technical changes we promised in our contracts but also deeper, sustained changes within systems and communities.
To accomplish this task, we rooted our evaluation approach in FSG’s “Water of Systems Change” framework by John Kania (who serves on Third Sector’s board), Mark Kramer, and Peter Senge to uncover the contributions of our technical assistance to systems change and to be able to describe systems-level impacts.
We translated this framework into the following guiding questions to organize the case studies:
• Structural: How are current resources and practices different from before?
• Relational: How do norms, relationships, and power dynamics differ from before?
• Transformative: How are key actors in the system thinking and acting in different ways than before?
• Community: How has the project improved outcomes for people accessing services? Have we improved the lives of people facing the greatest barriers to resources and opportunity?
In addition to this framework, we partnered with the equitable evaluation advisor and LEEAD scholar David Hanson to embed culturally responsive and equitable evaluation practices in our approach, from the questions we ask to how we engage stakeholders and talk about evaluation. Expanding the Bench, an initiative dedicated to expanding diversity in research and evaluation, defines such practices this way:
Culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE) requires the integration of diversity, inclusion, and equity in all phases of evaluation. CREE incorporates cultural,
structural, and contextual factors (e.g., historical, social, economic, racial, ethnic, gender) using a participatory process that shifts power to individuals most impacted.
CREE is not just one method of evaluation; it is an approach that should be infused into all evaluation methodologies. CREE advances equity by informing strategy, program improvement, decision-making, policy formation, and change.
Our approach to evaluation and case studies embodies these core values of equity, inclusion, accountability, and shared learning. Case studies focus on authentic stakeholder engagement and emphasize lived experiences and storytelling over quantitative data and metrics alone. Evaluation uses stakeholder accounts to assess and understand systems change impacts. It also prioritizes feedback from program participants to help us understand community-level impacts. Capturing stories of change from stakeholders involved in or affected by each project represents the crux of our approach to systems change evaluation.
It is important to note that as one actor in complex systems, Third Sector cannot claim attribution for systems- or community-level impacts. We did not attempt to prove causation or attribution. Instead, our case studies focused on exploring how projects supported by Third Sector contributed to systems and community change.
We found that focusing on how Third Sector, alongside other stakeholders, contributed to the project’s outcomes worked well. The evaluators determined that when engaging various stakeholders, it was impossible to separate Third Sector’s impact from the project’s impact. They were one and the same to the participants.
With these frameworks in place, Cause IMPACTS set out to uncover stories of change inspired by four Third Sector projects. Cause IMPACTS was able to identify shifts at the structural, relational, transformative, and community levels and highlight lessons that guide Third Sector’s current and future strategies.
If you want to try out our approach, we have four recommendations for measuring systems change:
1. Apply a systems lens view Use the Water of Systems Change framework to explore the project’s story, including what happened at the structural, relational, and transformative levels, and to shape your research questions and analysis. You can also use the framework as a probe to go deeper in conversations with stakeholders. Look for shifts across levels to understand how systems changed over the course of the project and how change was sustained once it ended.
2. Embed equity. Use a culturally responsive and equitable evaluation approach. Do this by recognizing the value of lived
experiences and storytelling as a powerful form of data. Include the voices and expertise of system stakeholders and community members throughout the research process, not just during data collection. Partner with them to define research questions, make sense of data, and confirm insights. Remember to always compensate participants for their time and contributions. We used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to estimate how much to pay participants, seeking to pay at or above the living wage. For each hour, we provided gift cards valued at $20-$25. We also recognized participants by listing their names in the case study reports. Consult Expanding the Bench for resources on CREE.
3. Focus on your contribution. With systems change, it is nearly impossible to claim attribution for projects outside a lab. Instead, tell the story of what happened, the players involved, and what changed over time because of your organization’s role. Listen closely to stakeholders to understand what changes emerged and how your work may have contributed to those shifts.
4. Begin in the world of your stakeholder. Remember that the person you speak with does not have the same view of the project as you do. Understand that person’s entry point and
ask questions from there. If stakeholders do not know your organization and they know the project by a particular name or through a process with a caseworker, be sure you’re using scaffolding that makes sense in their world. Don’t ask, “What was your experience with Third Sector or the Full Service Partnership?” Instead ask, “Have you noticed changes in your experience with your casework or at the clinic? What have those changes been like?”
This year, Third Sector is conducting five case studies and will continue to build on the findings. As we experiment with measuring systems change and gain insight into how to transform systems to make them more equitable and outcomes-focused, we must share best practices and frameworks. Systems change is long-arc work. We can accelerate the pace of change by sharing and learning together as a field.
ANNIE NEIMAND is a social movement sociologist and strategist. She is the director of impact and evaluation for Third Sector and serves on the leadership team for the Radical Communicators Network.
ANUM ALI MOHAMMED is director of research and data analytics at Cause IMPACTS, a female-owned social impact strategy consulting firm based in Los Angeles.
WANT BETTER GOVERNMENT?
PHILANTHROPY CAN (AND SHOULD!) HELP
Funders need to take governing institutions seriously and invest in their capacity.
BY DANIEL STID
In recent decades, philanthropy has increased its investments in policy advocacy to realize strategic objectives in issues ranging from education, climate, and public health to immigration, criminal justice, and political economy. But are the legislative and executive branches of our federal, state, and local governments—the bodies responsible for making and administering policy—up to the task?
An early 2022 survey of Candid’s database on Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy indicated that US foundations dedicated $14.7 billion to democracy-related causes and grantees over the previous decade. In the same period, however, foundations allocated just $478 million, a mere 3 percent of that total, to improving government capacity and performance. Philanthropic funders are skimping on investing in the capacity and performance of our faltering governing institutions, even as they attempt to push through higher-octane inputs to the policymaking process. This is a recipe for failure. There are notable exceptions, to be sure. Bloomberg Philanthropies has invested heavily in supporting innovation in mayoral offices and administrative capacity at the municipal level. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has made a point of building governing capacity in Congress and the executive branch. An especially auspicious development is the newly launched Recoding America Fund, a six-year, $120 million grantmaking initiative that is setting out “to reform the administrative state at the federal and state levels and expand American capacity and competitiveness.” These examples, however, alongside a few other pattern-breakers, are exceptions that prove the rule. Philanthropy presumes that helping to improve the capacity and performance of governing institutions is not its job.
Understandable, if flawed, reasons support this view. Since government resources dwarf those of philanthropy, it is counterintuitive for funders to see a need to invest in government resources. But that thinking overlooks barriers that government executives and legislators face when it comes to investing their scarce time and the taxpayers’ money in building the capacity of the institutions where they serve. In the absence of ideas, advocacy, and material support from outside the government, officials are inclined to neglect or even abuse the health of those institutions. Many elected and appointed executive branch officials often rail against “government bureaucracy,” as if they were not in charge of it. Likewise, lawmakers can find it politically advantageous to campaign against their own legislatures and to cut funding for essential activities within them in penny-wise, pound-foolish ways.
The increasingly polarized nature of philanthropy also reduces funders’ support for institutional innovation and development. A growing number of funders interested in pushing our society and the economy to the right or the left are ambivalent about governing institutions. They support branches of government when “their side” has control and oppose them when the “other side” wins. But that approach, instrumental rather than institutional, is an undemocratic way of funding democracy. Instead of bolstering institutions so that whoever is elected can put them to better use, polarized philanthropy overrides the electorate, hitting the gas or brakes depending on the political preferences of funders.
Where Do We Go from Here?
What would it look like for philanthropy to take governing institutions seriously and invest in their capacity? Here are five steps that farsighted funders should take:
1. Strike a better balance between support for inputs to government and the “throughputs” of government—respectively, the capacity and performance of our legislative and executive branches. The balance doesn’t need to be evenly divided, but unless philanthropic support for governing institutions at the federal, state, and local levels increases in substantial ways, funders’ investments in inputs will have diminishing returns. A reasonable initial target would be a threefold increase in the proportion of funding dedicated to legislative and executive branch performance in the democracy field. Tripling this figure would take us to approximately 10 percent of total annual foundation funding for US democracy. From there, we can build!
2. Invest steadily and patiently, regardless of what party controls which institutions. Financial investors struggle to time the stock market. So too will philanthropic funders struggle if they try to surge or scale back support for improving governing institutions depending on who controls them. Funders should invest in good ideas and promising nonprofit organizations and networks for the long haul. Institutional development and change in government take time, even decades. The push for civil service reform took a century to come to fruition at all levels of government. We can’t presume that the complex tasks we face will be wrapped up within the confines of one or two electoral cycles.
3. Underwrite ideas, research, and development alongside reform work and operational activities. The task of institutional reform and government development has become much more complex. It requires grappling with the persistent thickening of the institutional and policy environment within and between levels of government. These processes are taking place amid accelerating technological change and the social and economic dislocations that come with it. Overcoming the daunting challenges we face will require fresh thinking, experimentation, and new approaches that chart a way forward. Philanthropy is uniquely positioned to support discovery and innovation in the research and policy realms and to underwrite the requisite links between them. For our governing institutions to flourish in the 21st century, funders will need to help.
4. Recognize that the revitalization of our governing institutions will depend on talented members of rising generations of Americans serving in them. We need younger, more diverse, and tech-savvy public servants. The civil service reform movement of the previous century at once attracted and cleared the way for talented young people to dedicate themselves to public service. We need to restore its luster for those at the start of their careers and for other Americans who can bring mission-critical expertise to government, even if just on a time-limited basis, later in their professional lives. Reforming long-outdated laws, regulations, and organizational culture that make it hard to recruit, retain, and develop public servants will surely help. So will talent pipelines and professional development programs that inspire and guide people to enter public service and help them learn, grow, and contribute as they pursue it.
5. Build infrastructure and networks in the government reform field, linking and supporting grantees who demonstrate a knack for collaboration. Earlier generations of institutional reformers solved coordination problems, for example, by establishing the National Civil Service Reform League. Currently, we are not in a position to establish one national entity, nor would we want to, given the diversity in perspectives and work that characterizes the field. That gives funders even more reason to support entities that provide shared infrastructure and public goods that other organizations, leaders, and researchers can use. Funders can help link different groups so that the whole amounts to much more than the sum of the parts. They should also identify individuals who are inclined to collaborate in constructive ways and fund them so they can continue their work.
No doubt funders can take other helpful steps. We need profound changes and much more ample philanthropy to help bring them about. The stakes are high, and the payoff would be enormous. Generations of Americans who pushed to reform government, from inside and outside, rose to the occasion in the first part of the 20th century. As a result, we have enjoyed decades of more effective government. To live up to their legacy, it is time to join forces in a new government reform league for the 21st century.
DANIEL STID is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes on civil society, philanthropy, and democratic governance.
INNOVATING GOVERNANCE
To build a future where government truly works for people, human services leaders must cocreate a shared vision that moves beyond incremental change to reimagine outcomes, equity, and data infrastructure at scale.
BY RODERICK BREMBY & MISHAELA DURÁN
What makes a person more likely to thrive? It isn’t a job, housing, or childcare, but all three factors working together. For decades, however, the government has delivered and measured each of these in isolation, even though the outcomes we care about most—economic mobility, community stability, and healthy families—can’t be achieved within the confines of one agency’s purview.
Misalignment comes at a cost. Administrators track Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participation without linking data to long-term earnings. We measure high school graduation rates without acknowledging the behavioral health support that helped get students there. We manage programs and count outputs instead of investing in what people need and accounting for outcomes that cut across systems and evolve over time.
In our work across three federal administrations and in multiple states, we’ve witnessed the fallout when well-meaning programs fail to prioritize what families need. As longtime public servants, we’ve seen both the urgency of getting this right and the prospect of success. Now is the moment to define a national vision for human services based on upstream interventions, shared data, and bold collaboration across agencies. Rather than new programs, we need a new approach to ensure effective government.
THE NEED FOR VISION
Given that public agencies around the country have expressed interest in becoming more outcomes-focused but lack a shared vision, the present moment is consequential. Government systems often define success using narrow program metrics when the real outcomes—whether someone secures stable housing or finishes school, for example—involve several policy areas and agencies.
After decades of working in education, youth justice, public health, and family services, we know that community-led systems change is possible, but only communities are willing to rethink how government defines and delivers support.
WHAT GOVERNMENT GETS RIGHT
Bipartisan consensus has emerged around the need to shift from outputs (what and how many services are delivered) to outcomes (what changed). At the federal level, efforts such as the US Council on Economic Mobility have brought together agencies to coordinate on strategies that support individuals and families seeking to achieve long-term success. State agencies are using data in creative ways to improve service delivery and inform decision-making. Most of these initiatives are products of cross-agency task forces or partnerships between state government, academic institutions, and nonprofits, offering a model for broader systems transformation.
A recent collaboration between Mississippi state agencies and researchers at the University of Mississippi used matched data to evaluate TANF participation against long-term earnings and employment, a trend in several states that have embraced matched-data analysis for TANF work outcomes
Kentucky has emerged as a national leader in integrated data infrastructure after building a cross-agency data system that connects information on education, the workforce, health, and human services. By linking these datasets, Kentucky has better informed policymaking, using initiatives such as a 1115 Medicaid waiver. This approach not only improves program design but also enables the state to direct supports earlier and more equitably.
In Ohio, the PAX Good Behavior Game, an evidence-based classroom practice that enables teachers to proactively reduce the likelihood of future behavioral health interventions and justice system involvement, has been scaled statewide.
But those three cases are still exceptions. Without a national strategy or the infrastructure to connect data and track outcomes across systems, most states are left to devise their own tools from scratch, slowing progress, duplicating efforts, and missing critical opportunities to scale what works.
WHERE SYSTEMS FALL SHORT
Despite these bright spots, many public systems remain siloed, reactive, and constrained by short-term funding. Budget cycles prioritize short-term outputs, not long-term outcomes. Data systems rarely talk to one another. When outcomes in one system depend on inputs from another, as they often do, the gaps are compounded.
We’ve seen states spend billions to create bespoke data systems, each with different technical requirements, only to build the same silos these systems were intended to dismantle. Educational success may depend on mental health support, which relies on housing stability, but the systems designed to measure and fund these services operate independently. As a result, data infrastructure that is supposed to enable coordinated service delivery reinforces fragmentation.
The absence of shared infrastructure at the national level exacerbates these problems. Bearing the cost of duplicative systems that can’t communicate across jurisdictional lines or agency boundaries, states are left with inefficiencies, missed opportunities for coordination, and a patchwork that limits our ability to understand or act on cross-system outcomes.
Even where strong data exists, it’s often underused. In Connecticut, a Pay for Success project examined how a lack of access to diapers contributed to maternal depression, a Medicaid-covered condition. Universal diaper provisioning would have reduced maternal mental health costs,
but budget constraints redirected prevention funding. This pilot revealed both the opportunity and fragility of systems-level innovation.
Lack of shared infrastructure among federal and state systems fuels duplication, inefficiency, and delay. Civil servants are ready to lead on outcomes, but without clarity, data access, or direction, their efforts often stall before starting.
WHAT’S NEEDED: A NATIONAL VISION AND SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE
Rather than resisting change, public servants are asking for more defined goals, better tools, and alignment among agencies to help them succeed. A national vision for human services should:
• Remain grounded in data that reflects cross-system impacts
• Adapt to state contexts while upholding equity standards
• Work with communities and individuals most impacted by these systems to cocreate change instead of imposing it.
We can no longer afford to track outputs in isolation. Policy makers and funders must ask, What changed? For whom, and why?
The good news is that the means to support this transformation already exist. Technologies like Salesforce’s Data Cloud allow government agencies to connect data across platforms in real time, without duplicating or dismantling systems. This architecture enables us to visualize relationships and tailor interventions in more precise ways.
A new vision for outcomes must include indicators of emotional and intergenerational well-being, not just economic metrics. If a child reaches third grade without literacy proficiency, for example, we might be able to predict a host of downstream challenges. Preventing that outcome means investing early and tracking long-term gains, not just annual program participation.
CALL TO ACTION
The shift to outcomes-focused governance requires more than new tech or pilot programs. It calls for courage. We must “burn the boats” by letting go of outdated frameworks and committing to a bold direction, even if the path is unfamiliar.
We have the research, technology, and leadership. What’s missing is a shared commitment and understanding of governance that invests upstream, empowers civil servants, and reconnects government to its purpose: helping communities thrive.
A vision for human services must start with the premise that people are not problems to be solved. They are partners in the work of creating thriving communities. And just like in any strong partnership, we must be willing to listen, adapt, and evolve together.
RODERICK BREMBY is founder and CEO of The Bremby Group LLC and former regional vice president of Industry Strategy and Go-To-Market for the Salesforce Global Public Sector Digital Transformation team. He is an advisory board member at Third Sector and previously served as the social services commissioner for Connecticut and secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, where he led statewide efforts to modernize health and human services systems and improve outcomes for families and their communities.
MISHAELA DURÁN is the Inaugural Research Scholar at Arizona State University’s Latinx Oral History Lab and a board member at Third Sector. She has led national nonprofits and held senior roles in local, state, and federal government, including the US Department of Health and Human Services.
RESTORING TRUST
What we ask of our institutions, systems, and governing structures—to love all—we must also ask of ourselves.
BY KESHA LEE
Something remarkable was happening in evening Zoom sessions with parents and policy makers at the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC). Participants weren’t just strategizing about childcare. In their discussions, they were redesigning the work of making decisions through collaboration.
For nearly three years, the OEC, together with its Parent Cabinet, has been coleading an experiment many have tried but abandoned: moving at the speed of trust to integrate parents into central decision-making roles. What if agencies serving children, families, and our most vulnerable citizens could redefine their work as service providers to become community stewards, engaging people as cocreators of the policies that shape their lives? Trust deepens and meaningful outcomes are possible when communities hold power.
WHY MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT MATTERS
Research by the Frameworks Institute shows that 70 percent of Americans believe the government is rigged. That is a staggering number, but it can point us toward an opportunity we have missed for too long.
What if all we need to do is return to the ancient wisdom we’ve abandoned (Indigenous healing circles, elders on the porch in Black communities, circles of trust, and mutual aid networks), wherein problems were addressed and opportunities created in community? Decades of superficial consulting and tokenism, especially with Black and Brown communities and other people furthest from opportunity, have reinforced skepticism and a profound sense of disconnect between communities and government.
In my work as a consultant, I have seen government officials endlessly discuss outcomes, which is indeed a starting point. My experience in the field, however, has shown me that improved metrics won’t rebuild trust if we’re still treating people as data points instead of decision makers. Achieving outcomes and real engagement means practicing trust through transparency, shared power, and continuous feedback. It means abandoning performative outreach and adopting a consistent practice of accountability and shared stewardship.
NGOS AS BRIDGES
At Third Sector, my colleagues and I have the privilege of serving as a bridge between government agencies trying to solve problems and the communities that will live with the policy solutions. I came to Third Sector with a renewed sense of purpose following years of consulting at the local, national, and international levels on ways to improve outcomes for children and families. My consulting work had ebbs and flows. I often felt distressed about whether my colleagues and I were making a difference, especially in situations where community and government seemed most disconnected.
Then I went to Nepal.
A year after the Nepali government decentralized education, granting local authorities decision-making power in their communities, I found myself in a remote village visiting a school managed by parents, grandparents, and caregivers in partnership with regional education leaders. As the elders led me around, proudly showing off improvements, I witnessed how empowerment, trust, and love had converged to improve early childhood conditions in a local context. It was a beautiful reminder that responsive government and community decision-making can work, and it solidified my conviction about what responsive government looks like.
My experience wasn’t one of complete idealism but reminded me of my own schooling in Alabama, my time teaching in Washington, DC, and my work for an education nonprofit supporting Seattle Public Schools. In every case, it was the community collaborating with public institutions that yielded better results.
In California, we’re seeing the same principles at work through the iCARE program. When Sutter-Yuba Behavioral Health (SYBH) launched a new field-based initiative, it didn’t just ask clients what they thought of the program. Instead, SYBH handed them the pen. Participants weighed in on the learning framework, leading to a revised evaluation plan. SYBH consumers then created their own survey, articulating their own definitions of wellness, recovery, and participation. Third Sector served as partners, facilitating this community-led process and sharing tools and resources to amplify community expertise. As a result, SYBH is now integrating consumer-defined metrics into its behavioral health system, modeling meaningful approaches to defining outcomes, and leading the way for other California counties.
In early 2025, Third Sector partnered with the California Council on Criminal Justice and Behavioral Health to form the Superior Region Champions Council. In this work, we brought together advocates with experience in Northern California’s behavioral health and criminal legal systems. We paid participants for their expertise, moved at their pace instead of our own, and designed every detail from meeting times to food preferences to mitigate barriers to participation. Council members, for their part, had sufficient space to develop advocacy plans, advance their conflict-resolution skills, share their expertise and lived experience, and use the experience with both systems to help shape policies and practices.
Admittedly, the challenges were real. Community-based organizations and participating partners were skeptical of us and sometimes one another. Housing insecurity, job demands, and family emergencies meant that not everyone was always equally involved. But we stayed
the course, leaning into the discomfort, listening and adjusting to human needs, and creating opportunities for participants to stay up to speed, easing their return to the table.
In our final Champions Council gathering, the group’s commitment was clear. As one participant put it: “I want CCJBH and Third Sector to know that the work you all are doing matters. Thank you for this opportunity, and I look forward to overcoming and cocreating even with budget cuts, opposition, and adversity. We will rise!”
These examples come from different contexts, but the principles of transparency, accountability, and shifting power to communities remain the same. This is what rebuilding trust looks like. Rather than emphasizing metrics or methodologies, we worked through the messy middle, hearing from community members who will feel the greatest impact of policies and decisions.
WHAT GOVERNMENT AND AGENCIES CAN TAKE AWAY
I’ll be honest: This work isn’t easy, and in my 18 years working in early childhood and education policy, I’ve often contemplated leaving the field, because facilitating these conversations can weigh on me. Governments and agencies wanting to improve community outcomes must be ready to rebuild trust, acknowledge the power they hold, and show a willingness to share it. That’s difficult for any institution, but after watching it work in Nepali villages, California conference rooms, and communities across the nation, I know it’s possible through applying a few essential practices:
• Reposition as stewards, not providers . Agencies must see their primary role as empowering communities rather than delivering top-down decisions and solutions. This shift is
crucial, because government agencies are stewards of the community’s resources (i.e., tax dollars, public land, and collective well-being). The question isn’t “How do we deliver services?” but “How do we support communities in shaping their own future?”
• Consistently ask hard questions. Whose outcomes are we prioritizing and why? Are we genuinely consulting and heeding the voices of those most affected, or just the individuals easiest to reach? How do we ensure that changes stick instead of disappearing when leadership shifts?
• Compensate people for their expertise. Allocate budgets and resources to ensure that community participation is cultivated and recognized. As our CCJBH Champions Council project found, paying participants for their expertise conveys that their knowledge has real value and encourages meaningful involvement.
• Expect the messy middle. Prioritize long-term relationships over quick wins. This includes putting systems in place to navigate the often tense and challenging moments that accompany transparent information exchange and regular feedback. Trust emerges through consistent follow-through, not one-off workshops.
• Let communities define success. Integrating community-defined metrics of success helps. If you’re measuring outcomes that communities didn’t help identify, you’re measuring the wrong things.
RESTORING DEMOCRACY
Parents and policy makers in Connecticut who invested their evenings in Zoom sessions show what’s possible with an ongoing commitment to community-designed solutions. After two years of trustbuilding and governance design, the Parent Cabinet is gearing up for the next stage: integrating parent leadership into agencies that help make important decisions affecting children and families. The essential work of bringing community voices into policymaking only happens once trust is firmly in place.
Moving from transactional services to steward-based relationships is more than mere policy reform. It restores what democracy was meant to be. Government by and for the people demands practice, investment, and an unwavering commitment to trust and community building. When the room filled at the final Champions Council meeting and people heard the declaration “We will rise!” it was an amplified call to action, a reminder that when we create the conditions for people to be heard and exercise real authority over decisions that affect their lives, something powerful awakens. The innovation we need to achieve meaningful outcomes lies within our grasp. We can find it in ancient wisdom circles, elders making decisions together, communities stewarding their own futures, and the recognition that the people closest to the problem are often closest to the solution.
KESHA LEE is managing director, early childhood at Third Sector. A systems specialist with more than 18 years of experience leading programs and advising social enterprises and government agencies on designing equitable education programs and systems, she has held senior roles at the Hurston/Wright Foundation, First Book, the World Bank, and the Clinton Foundation.
EMPOWERING PUBLIC SERVANTS WHILE ADVANCING EQUITABLE OUTCOMES
Our work in the Transformational Change Partnership demonstrates how investing in public officials can generate system-level improvements.
BY WILLIAM RHETT & JASON WILLIS
For decades, outcomes-focused government has promised a more effective and accountable public sector. Yet the reality in communities looks fragmented and the results ineffectual, in part because public agency professionals lack the support required to build capacity and institutional culture, especially the time, means, and space to adopt an outcomes mindset. What would it take to accelerate that shift?
The work of our organizations, together with the Transformational Change Partnership (TCP), offers some early answers.
REFRAMING GOVERNMENT FROM WITHIN
Despite decades of reform efforts, many government institutions remain structurally misaligned with the needs of the people they serve.
From health and human services to workforce and education systems, public agency staff have greater incentive to implement regulations and ensure compliance than to fulfill their mission of addressing community challenges or improving lives. This disconnect between the how and
the why is not just a policy matter. It’s also embedded in how public servants are trained, evaluated, and supported throughout their careers.
Trust in government has declined while the sense that systems are failing to deliver on their most basic responsibilities has increased. Americans share a belief that government systems are rigid, opaque, and unresponsive to everyday struggles and long-term goals. One explanation is that government agencies have not been equipped to define or pursue success in meaningful ways.
In this context, “outcomes-focused government” is a paradigm shift, not simply a technical fix. It requires agencies to reimagine their work as achieving measurable, equitable improvements in people’s lives. It depends not just on leadership or data infrastructure, but also on the capacity of public servants—an often overlooked factor. If we expect civil servants to focus on outcomes, we must invest in their ability to do so, which requires a combination of culture shifts in policy and administration.
That’s the challenge we confronted with the Transformational Change Partnership, a pilot effort to reimagine how public professionals are equipped to think about their roles, tools, and accountability to their communities.
A NEW MODEL FOR ACCELERATING OUTCOMES ORIENTATION
Launched in 2023, the Transformational Change Partnership is a first-of-its-kind fellowship that uses a structured learning and capacity-building model to help county-based agency professionals reconceive the implementation of new policies and programs. TCP integrates the comprehensive capacities required to improve services with a learn-by-doing approach that accelerates proficiency.
County-based teams, comprising public servants from various departments, community members, and partner organizations, collaborate on improvement projects over a nine-month period. These projects address pressing implementation challenges and policy mandates while serving as a vehicle for capacity building. The program effectively braids together well-tested elements, such as data analysis, interagency coordination, and performance management, with newer tools from service design and implementation science. The result is a pragmatic structure that not only resolves immediate problems but also seeds longer-term, sustainable changes.
Participants are supported through a series of structured progressions:
• Break free from the status quo: Practicing skills to set strategic direction, build community relationships, and rethink entrenched processes.
• Learn by doing: Applying change management and continuous learning tools to real-time implementation challenges.
• Sustain and grow: Refining and scaling the work to strengthen systemwide capacity for innovation and outcomes orientation. The program emphasizes ease of understanding, relevance to daily work, and applicability to live projects, allowing new knowledge to be readily redeployed across agencies and contexts.
WHAT EMERGES FROM THE COHORTS
When TCP cohorts conclude, participants recognize how structured learning and real-time application can generate system-level improvements.
In Placer County, California, for example, a cross-agency team focused on improving the reentry process for individuals exiting jail with serious mental illness. Facing overlapping mandates from California initiatives (CARE Act and CalAIM), the team reduced siloed communication, aligned partnerships between the sheriff’s office and community providers, piloted new reentry aids such as contingency housing plans and peer involvement, and developed infrastructure for a more responsive system of care. These efforts addressed a critical service gap and strengthened the team’s long-term capacity for continuous improvement. A follow-up survey eight months after the close of the cohort revealed that the team’s ability to implement change remained high.
Cohorts have focused on areas such as Medicaid payment reform (under the CalAIM waiver), justice-involved services, and behavioral health services for children and youth, using TCP projects to measurably improve implementation while building
shared practices among agencies. One participant reported that the “experience has given me new skills and insight … and what I, as a leader, can do differently to help create change in our system.”
What ties together these experiences is an emphasis on learning through action. By integrating data analysis, interagency coordination, performance management, and service design into real-world projects, participants build practical capabilities they can carry forward. TCP supports the creation of project-aligned teams whose members champion improvements within their agencies, ensuring that new capacities don’t end with a single project but extend into future efforts.
RECLAIMING THE PUBLIC ROLE
At its core, TCP helps public servants reclaim the purpose of their work. An outcomes-focused approach repositions them not as enforcers of static processes, but as adaptive leaders with public value who have the skills, permission, and confidence to achieve better results for the community. This reframing is vital in areas marked by historical disinvestment or structural inequity, where new policies and programs seek to transform the service delivery system to improve outcomes.
A change to outcomes orientation requires more than a one-time training. It calls for long-term investments in professional development, continuous learning, and alignment at the system level. It also means confronting the structural incentives that keep government agencies focused on compliance: risk aversion, budget silos, and limited feedback loops.
That’s why we see TCP not as a stand-alone intervention, but as part of a larger strategy to rehumanize public work. By embedding capacities for transformational change in agency roles and functions—and making real progress on real challenges—we can begin to make government more effective and more just.
TOWARD A MORE RESPONSIVE PUBLIC SECTOR
If the United States is to move beyond piecemeal reform and toward a responsive, equitable public sector, developing civil servants’ capacity must be a top priority. Agencies have to move beyond the assumption that change can be mandated from above to build the conditions for civil servants to lead from where they are. We believe that outcomes-focused training and structured improvement experiences such as TCP can become an essential part of that investment.
Scaling this approach will require the collaboration of public, philanthropic, and academic sectors. It will also require patience. But the early promise of TCP shows that when given the structure, support, and opportunity to act, public servants can help transform government from the inside out.
WILLIAM RHETT is managing director, behavioral health at Third Sector, with more than 20 years of clinical and consulting experience in behavioral health.
JASON WILLIS is a clinical professor of public policy at the McGeorge School of Law, where he teaches classes on systemic change, building societal capacity, and public finance. He is also the director for the Transformational Change Partnership (TCP). He has more than 20 years of experience in public finance practice in K-12 education, health, and child services.
GOING GLOBAL
Outcomes-focused financing can improve government effectiveness around the world.
BY KUSI HORNBERGER & TIM PENNELL
Many of the challenges that outcomes-focused government seeks to address in the United States—job creation, homelessness, education, and mental health—are also entrenched in other countries, even in places where social safety nets are stronger. As governments worldwide search for more effective ways to deliver results, a global effort is emerging. How might the United States and countries such as Canada, EU member states, and India ignite transformational shifts that make public spending more outcomes-oriented?
In recent years, international development and social impact practitioners have embraced outcomes-based financing (OBF) as a way to move beyond traditional funding models that reward activity instead of impact. At its core, OBF reorients public and philanthropic spending from rigid program designs to more flexible, accountable structures that connect payments to achieving outcomes. While the concept is not new, its practical application, along with the levers governments can use, have started to expand in significant ways.
From impact bonds to social impact incentives and performancebased contracting, governments and funders have a growing tool kit to help them link funding to results. Each mechanism, playing a different role, offers governments flexibility to adopt approaches suited to their own regulatory, political, and institutional contexts.
GLOBAL CASE STUDIES
As outlined in Scaling Impact: Finance and Investment for a Better World, a plethora of global examples shows how OBF can improve government effectiveness by strengthening accountability, enabling data-driven learning, promoting disciplined performance management, and aligning financial incentives with social impact.
1. Improving Accountability and Transparency | In Turkey, Dalberg supported the design of a Social Impact Bond that tied government payments to verified employment outcomes in the tech sector. The Istanbul Development Agency partnered with private investors and training providers to launch a program to address youth unemployment. Investors provided up-front capital for software as well as information and communication technology (ICT) training, and the government repaid
only when job placement and retention targets were met. This approach created a transparent, accountable funding mechanism—ensuring that taxpayer dollars flowed to effective programs—and established a replicable model for cross-sector partnerships that hold all actors responsible for the results.
In the United States, Pay for Success projects (the US term for Social Impact Bonds) have been gaining traction since 2012. Six years after President Donald Trump signed the $100 million Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) into law as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, this demonstration program is poised for scaling up. SIPPRA’s Pay for Success contracts enable the federal government to invest in cost-effective, locally oriented strategies with increased transparency from embedded evaluations and reporting. While these early SIPPRA-funded projects are in progress, this approach can be scaled (to $1 billion over the course of 10 years).
2. Encouraging Continuous Learning and Data-Driven Decision-Making | India’s Skill Impact Bond illustrates how OBF can embed continuous learning into public programs. Dalberg worked with that country’s National Skill Development Corporation to digitize outcome tracking and identify factors contributing to high dropout rates among female trainees. These insights led to targeted interventions, including health support, and facilitated real-time adjustments based on performance data. The initiative not only improved program responsiveness and equity but also demonstrated how embedding feedback loops in funding models strengthens a government’s ability to learn and adapt.
As part of a 2018 outcomes-focused financing project, Third Sector developed an improvement process for government and community partners to integrate arrest, incarceration, housing tenancy, Medicaid, and program participation data to monitor critical performance indicators and anticipate enrollment, retention, and well-being challenges. Third Sector partnered with Lane County, Oregon, and the nonprofit Sponsors Inc. to secure funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Department of Justice for a Pay for Success Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) project. The outcomes contract established a flexible housing model to provide Housing First PSH services.
To date, more than 230 individuals have been housed with a housing stability rate greater than 85 percent. The incarceration rate due to new felony convictions has fallen to 11 percent, which represents a reduction in recidivism of almost 60 percent for individuals enrolled in the project compared to the overall reentry population in Lane County. After earning outcome payments, the project is sustained by state, county, and philanthropic funds.
3. Promoting Disciplined Performance Management and Scalable Delivery | In Mexico, the government supported the expansion of Clínicas del Azúcar (CdA)—a social enterprise providing affordable diabetes care—using a Social Impact Incentive. Outcome funders made bonus payments for verified improvements achieved in patient health outcomes. This outcomes-focused structure has allowed clinics to scale in sustainable ways, maintain quality of care, and attract follow-on investment. Starting with just one clinic in Monterrey, CdA has expanded to more than 50 clinics across the country, including at least one in each state in Mexico, and even a clinic in San Antonio, Texas. This model exemplifies how linking funding to results can encourage disciplined execution while enabling high-performing service models to grow.
In California, $1 billion in public funds are invested annually in Full Service Partnerships (FSPs), which provide comprehensive communitybased services for more than 60,000 people facing severe and persistent mental illness. FSPs have tremendous potential to reduce psychiatric hospitalizations, homelessness, incarceration, and prolonged suffering by Californians with severe mental health needs. FSP programming, however, varies from county to county, with different operational definitions and a lack of consistent data processes that make it difficult to understand and tell a statewide story about impact.
To address this problem, Third Sector formed the California MultiCounty FSP Innovation Project, which brought together 10 counties to change how vital mental health services are developed, implemented, and evaluated, using an approach that is data-driven and person-centered. The project has enhanced the counties’ ability to use data to improve FSP services and outcomes, fostering collaboration, standardizing data reporting, and increasing consumer input in service changes and outcomes. The RAND Corporation recently evaluated the initial six counties in the project and found that FSP participants experienced on average 2.5 fewer psychiatric admissions, fewer arrests, and a lower likelihood of being arrested than non-FSP participants.
4. Aligning Financial Incentives with Social Outcomes | In Latin America and the Caribbean, IDB Invest and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) applied performance-based pricing to contracts with borrowers, tying financial incentives to the achievement of gender equity goals such as increasing women in leadership or lending to women-led businesses. Clients who met these milestones received interest rate reductions or performance-based grants, linking capital costs to social outcomes. Companies such as Grupo Elcatex in Honduras and Atlas Renewable Energy in Brazil qualified for these incentives by integrating gender equity strategies into their operations. This approach embedded accountability in financing structures, encouraged data tracking, and demonstrated how financial terms can be leveraged to accelerate organizational change and development efficiency.
In the United States, the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes (HEROES) program would have provided $99 million to explore how an incentive structure focusing on preventative care can change the health-care market and lead to better health outcomes. Before it was canceled this past summer, HEROES was one of the most significant and innovative public-private federal investments in health in US history. Health Accelerators (HAs)—organizations or regional coalitions consisting of health-care providers, nonprofit organizations, private companies, state-funded educational institutions, and other nongovernmental entities—would have provided preventative interventions to address alcohol-related emergencies, opioid overdoses, cardiovascular disease, and prenatal and postnatal health complications. ARPA-H would have made outcomes payments as an Outcomes Buyer, creating a structure that directs investments to health challenges where measurably achieved outcomes are purchased based on results.
CATALYZING GLOBAL SCALING OF OUTCOMES-FOCUSED FINANCING
These international cases suggest that becoming outcomes-oriented doesn’t require sweeping reforms or complex instruments. It calls for greater investment from government, philanthropy, and private investors to transform public systems. The cases described above reveal how outcomes-focused financing can move beyond experimentation to serve as an important means for improving public-sector performance.
Successes in countries such as Mexico, Turkey, and India demonstrate that OBF can do more than test new ideas, by redirecting government funding toward what works across sectors such as employment, health, and education. Rather than feasibility, the limiting factor is institutional readiness.
To accelerate adoption, US governments at all levels could:
• Establish innovation labs that cocreate OBF pilots with service providers and communities
• Use outcomes-focused federal grants (e.g., SIPPRA and ARPA-H HEROES in the United States) to catalyze local government transformation
• Support intermediaries to help design, manage, and evaluate performance-based contracts
• Participate in global learning exchanges to adapt proven international models (such as the Investors for Health or Education Finance Network communities of practice)
As public budgets become more strained and service demands continue to grow, governments can no longer afford to fund programs based entirely on intentions. Thoughtfully implemented outcomesfocused approaches can deliver better results, strengthen public trust, and help scale what works.
International models make clear that outcomes-focused public funding has transformed how governments define success, measure impact, and foster innovation. Now is the time to invest in a global movement to go beyond pilots and transform public systems and funding to pay for outcomes, not only activities.
KUSI HORNBERGER is a partner at Dalberg Capital, based in Washington, DC.
TIM PENNELL is managing director of strategy and programs at Third Sector Capital Partners, based in New York City.
Third Sector
is a national nonprofit helping to unlock possibility, confront inequity, and catalyze change to the benefit of the people and places our government, community-based, and philanthropic partners serve. We are a technical assistance organization that advises our government agencies on effective ways to reshape their policies, systems, and services toward better outcomes for all people no matter their race, background, and circumstances.