Framework & Revenue Model - Investing in Flourishing

Transforming Financing

Flip the investment emphasis to upstream flourishing, to support and reward holistic well-being, instead of from downstream reaction to illness and social failure. Create a sustainable financing model for community-led flourishing collaborations focused on youth and their families that can serve as a model for all other populations.

The Investing in Flourishing model is transformative. It blends best practices in advancing child flourishing outcomes with experience in creating successful, scalable investment markets. It builds on previous efforts to address the intersection of clinical care, social supports/services, and place-based community development. It builds on prior efforts to innovate financially by paying for outcomes. The IIF financing model is designed to shift upstream a portion of current health and social services spending AND free it to be spent by community-led collaborations on a variety of child/family/neighborhood needs to achieve flourishing, not just prevention/wellbeing activities in each specific sector.

Outcome

Create a system that places a financial value on youth flourishing. Create a national market for “Flourishing Bonds.” Reduce government, business, and societal costs (e.g., health care, corrections) while improving youth opportunity, educational results, employee productivity, and overall community health.

Our intended outcome is the transformation of what is funded in the United States in health and social services to create robust, thriving individuals and communities. The welcome byproduct of creating opportunities for all of our youth is that government, employers, and society will spend a lot less in the future on chronic illness and reacting to social failure: acute and chronic medical care, courts and jails, and rehabilitative services.

Revenue Model

Multiuse, multisource financing combining public, private, philanthropic, and community resources to sustain initiatives.

Investing upstream in flourishing creates downstream savings for multiple “beneficiary organizations” in multiple sectors. Shared savings agreements between community-led Flourishing Councils and those beneficiary organizations will produce revenue streams to blend to fund upstream external financing and other community needs. The kind of multiuse, multilevel action we are describing will not be funded by a single kind of investment with one level of risk and return. It will require coordinated, parallel investments to increase impact in the risk investment in three key streams or layers:

1

Attributable lives (e.g., specific youth and family members of a “Flourishing Club”)

2

Actions to improve quality of life in those peoples’ neighborhoods, undertaken in states and regions with supportive policies

3

Actions to address wealth building for individuals, families, and local businesses

We are committed to working with communities to co-design and refine this new comprehensive model to accommodate both the need for national scale and local flexibility.

We are focused on changing financial incentives by rewarding successful investment in upstream flourishing, instead of today’s overspending in response to illness and social failure. For this to happen, community leadership needs to institute formal and effective cross-sectoral collaboration and coordination between and among layers to effectively overcome today’s extreme fragmentation, gaps, and overlaps.