In 2017, after 20 years in the social sector, my development work for one of the largest children and family services nonprofits in the United States flung me headlong into the world of social finance and impact bonds. While it was a field I had always been interested in given my background in outcomes-based contracting and social entrepreneurship (as well as my own personal interest in all things economics/finance), I hadn’t jumped into it fully until that point in my career. Our organization was involved in a number of service areas that could benefit and scale from the use of SIBs, and I was tasked with identifying where those opportunities existed.
The problem, for me, was that the social finance world is far flung, and – unless you work directly for an organization deeply involved in the field – the available resources do not make it an intuitive landscape to simply pick up and learn. As a practitioner, I quickly came to the realization that the space would benefit from someone compiling and organizing impact bond details and social finance resources in one place in a way that could be shared with other service providers (who, presumably, were facing the same challenge).
And that’s how, in 2018, sib.thisisbenmurphy.com (originally socialsectorfinance.org) was born – out of necessity. This website is not an end product, but merely an ever-evolving resource center forged in a humble attempt to bring some order to my understanding of this young field of impact bond practices. I do hope that you’ll find this tool useful.
Please feel free to share this site with others, leverage the content contained herein (with appropriate citations), and please feel free to reach out to me with your ideas, questions, feedback, and the like. It is my fervent hope that this site will help accelerate the learning curve for others – both practitioners and academics – so that the field of social finance and the practice of impact bond work can grow and thrive as we seek to find innovative solutions to the complex social challenges we collectively face.
-Benjamin Murphy // LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Web