The Joyce Foundation Participates in White House Forum on Philanthropic Innovation

Ellen Alberding Presents the Power of Prizes.

Prizes catalyze change, infusing fresh approaches and funding to solve all sorts of challenges, whether the goal is to find and share the best ways community colleges can prepare workers for jobs, or determine the most effective channels to get emergency information to remote areas, or to develop a super fuel efficient new car.

On September 20th, the White House Office of Social Innovation brought together many of the country's top companies, foundations, and senior administration officials to brainstorm how prizes and other tools can be used, by working together, to help address the nation's most pressing challenges.

There's nothing new about prizes. 

	In 1795, Napoleon recognized that food that his troops needed to fight was spoiling before it reached them, so he issued a Food Preservation Prize challenge that resulted in the invention of canned food.
	Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize in 1919, offered by a New  York hotel owner, by completing the first trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris, and forever changing how we see and travel the world.
	Just a few years ago, NASA addressed complaints from astronauts saying their gloves weren't nimble enough to do the necessary work, so, through the Astronaut Glove Challenge, they found Maine engineer Peter Homer, who developed the winning glove at his dining room table.
	In 2009, the U.S. military's research arm, DARPA, hoped to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques could help accomplish large-scale, time-critical tasks. They scattered 10 red weather balloons across the country, and called teams across the country to action.  In less than 9 hours, a team from MIT reported the longitude and latitude of all 10 balloons, and gave the military new ways to operate in a range of situations from natural disasters to combat.

CLICK HERE to read the McKinsey & Company report about the types of prizes, when to use them, and how they might support your work.

HOW DO PRIZES WORK?: The government is looking to prizes as a critical tool to incentivize change, to reach beyond the "usual suspects" and inspire risk-taking, to increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars, level the playing field through credible rules and robust judging mechanisms, set ambitious goals, and pay only for success.

CLICK HERE to learn more about prizes at Challenge.gov, Government Challenges, Your Solutions.

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, a joint effort of the White House, Department of Education, Department of Defense, The Joyce Foundation, The Lumina Foundation, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Kresge Foundation and America Achieves, reaching the nation's 1200 community colleges. The Aspen Prize was sparked from a meeting of the Joyce Foundation and the White House Office of Social Innovation, later joined by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and catalyzed by ideas from the McKinsey & Company report "And the Winner is.."

Several ideas came together, and a coalition of support was developed. On October 5, 2010, the Aspen Prize was launched at the White House Community College Summit.

WHAT NEXT?  Interested to learn how prizes might help your work? 

• Define your problem and your target participants. What problem do you want to address?  Who do you hope to mobilize to compete?  What kind of prize competition makes sense?
• Find friends. This is a new field and it's hard to go it alone.  Find other funders interested in the same problem, and issue experts who can help define goals, barriers and risks.
• Be open to a range of ways to engage. You don't have to think about running a huge prize competition yourself.  You can host and manage the process, coordinate and help the team, or contribute thoughts or finances.
• Draw on resources. Challenge.gov is a great place to start.
• Consider large or small engagements - a little can go a long way.  Not every prize needs to be $1 Million. The Astronaut Glove Competition was solved for $25,000.
• Have fun! Out-of-discipline perspectives, joining forces with new and committed teams, can bring real and important change.

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