A student works with a Saga Education tutor, one of the programs supported through Maryland’s State Partnership for Proven Programs. (Photo courtesy of Saga Education)
In the United States, we ask state and local governments to do a great deal with limited resources. Every budget cycle requires trade-offs among competing priorities, often under intense time pressure and political scrutiny. In that environment, public dollars frequently flow toward programs that are familiar, longstanding, or administratively convenient rather than those most likely to produce lasting positive outcomes. The result is missed opportunity, despite the best intentions of public leaders.
This problem is especially frustrating because the evidence base for public policy has grown substantially over the past two decades. In that time, rigorous evaluations have identified interventions that improve outcomes in education, workforce development, and economic mobility. Some have demonstrated success across multiple settings, while others have shown strong promise and a clear theory of change supported by credible research. Policy makers know far more today than they once did about what works.
The challenge is how to use that evidence to drive budgets.
We come to this problem from different vantage points: philanthropy, state government, and the evidence-building field. Over the past two years, we have worked together on an approach designed to help states move proven programs from promising ideas to funded priorities. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model uses an advance philanthropic funding commitment to unlock matched public investment, overcome inertia, and reorient spending toward evidence-based solutions. It’s designed not simply to fund effective programs at scale, but to change how governments approach funding decisions by aligning incentives, authority, and accountability around evidence.
The Problem With Traditional Social Spending
Most public social spending is governed by formulas, legacy programs, and incremental adjustments to prior-year budgets. These structures offer predictability and administrative ease, but they also favor inertia over effectiveness. Once a program is funded, it tends to stay funded, regardless of whether it delivers strong results. New programs, even those supported by solid evidence, must compete for scarce discretionary dollars and often face steep barriers to entry.
Bureaucracy tends to reinforce this dynamic. State agencies are rightly cautious about taking on new initiatives that require complex coordination, changes to procurement, or new implementation capacity. Meanwhile, advocates for existing programs often have established constituencies and relationships that help preserve the status quo.
The costs of this structure are real. Dollars that could be directed toward interventions with a proven track record of success like improving graduation rates, increasing earnings, or reducing youth involvement with the justice system instead remain tied up in programs that may do little to change outcomes. Opportunities to scale effective solutions are lost, not because they lack credible evidence, but because funding systems are not designed to reward proof of impact. This may sound like a wonky budgeting problem, but the consequences are deeply human: fewer students completing college, fewer young people receiving effective support, and fewer families benefiting from programs that could improve their lives.
Investing in Evidence
The central innovation of this model is the use of an advance philanthropic funding commitment to change the calculus of public investment.
Under the model, a philanthropic partner (in this case, Arnold Ventures) commits funding upfront, contingent on the state matching those dollars and directing the combined investment toward a menu of programs supported by rigorous evidence. This advance commitment functions as a catalyst. It reduces fiscal risk for the state, creates a clear incentive to engage with more evidence-based interventions, and opens space for conversations that might otherwise stall.
This approach differs fundamentally from social impact bonds or pay-for-success contracts. Those models ask investors to bear the risk while government waits to see if outcomes materialize. The State Partnership model inverts the logic: Philanthropy commits upfront to reduce government’s perceived risk of investing in programs where the evidence already exists, but where funding systems have failed to follow. The first question is no longer simply “Does this work?” For selected programs, rigorous evaluations have already answered that. The harder question is “How do we get proven programs funded at scale?”
Several elements are essential to making this work. First, public leadership must be fully bought in. Public partners, which can be state agencies, local government, or school districts, retain control over program selection and implementation, ensuring that investments align with local priorities and political realities. Second, the partners must share a commitment to using evidence as a practical guide to decision-making; investments are limited to programs that meet the agreed-upon evidence and implementation criteria. Third, the partnership includes technical support to help policy makers assess research, compare options, and design implementation plans that maintain program fidelity.
At the heart of the model is the program menu, and how it’s built matters as much as what’s on it. The menu is intentionally selective: It prioritizes interventions backed by rigorous impact evidence and the capacity for faithful implementation at scale. The point isn’t to crown a handful of favorite programs. It’s to give public leaders a short list of high-confidence options—best bets—where the expected return on scarce public dollars is meaningfully higher. For instance, many tutoring approaches are marketed to schools, but only a subset with rigorous, high-dosage designs have evidence strong enough to justify public investment at scale. A program’s absence from the menu doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It may simply mean the evidence is still emerging.
Ensuring equity in this model also means creating paths for newer interventions and leaders to gain investment. To that end, Arnold Ventures offered to fund additional randomized controlled trials alongside investments in proven programs, helping build the evidence base for promising approaches that aren’t yet ready for the menu.
Maryland: The First Partnership in Action
When Governor Wes Moore took office in Maryland, he set a clear standard for his administration: be “data driven and heart led.” From the start, the administration looked for new ways to infuse evidence into government spending. State leaders wanted to expand programs that could improve educational attainment and youth outcomes, with a particular focus on young men, but needed a mechanism to do so within existing budget constraints. The advance funding commitment provided exactly that.
The partnership brought together a $20 million advance commitment from Arnold Ventures and a matching $20 million investment from the state. With support from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, Maryland officials reviewed a menu of programs with strong or highly promising evidence of effectiveness and selected those that best fit the state’s goals and capacity. Local stakeholders played a central role in assessing readiness and implementation considerations. For example, district leaders from Baltimore City and Prince George’s County assessed specific school readiness for program implementation, and county leaders explored options to shift funding to support mentoring of high-risk youth.
The resulting investments included expansion of the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model at four community colleges, as well as implementation of Saga tutoring and ASSISTments, two programs shown to improve K-12 math achievement, in multiple school districts. In addition, the partnership will soon drive significant funding for Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring in nine Maryland counties.
These programs were selected not because they were trendy or new, but because they had demonstrated meaningful impact in multiple rigorous evaluations and offered a reasonable expectation of success at scale. The ASAP model increased college graduation rates by 15 percentage points in prior evaluations, and the Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring program reduced youth violence-related delinquent behavior by 24 percent and recurring substance use by 42 percent. In a field where many interventions produce modest or uncertain results, these programs represented unusually strong bets for public investment.
For Maryland leaders, the partnership created a practical mechanism to turn the Moore administration’s evidence-focused priorities into funded programs. By pairing philanthropic dollars with a state match, the advance commitment gave the state a structured way to identify evidence-backed options, allocate matching funds, and move quickly from policy interest to implementation.
What We’ve Learned—and What We’re Still Figuring Out
What surprised us most was how quickly the advance commitment changed the nature of the conversation. Typically, when a philanthropic partner approaches a state government about evidence-based programs, the response is polite but cautious. In this case, the commitment of real dollars up front, contingent on a state match, opened doors to more concrete conversations with state leaders about evidence, implementation, and trade-offs. Most importantly, in Maryland, it helped drive $40 million toward evidence-based programs in less than two years. That kind of speed is unusual in government.
The model also created room for a different kind of conversation: not only which proven programs to expand, but what it would take to implement them well and learn from the expansion. By elevating the focus on impact in funding decisions, the partnership encouraged state agencies, local providers, and philanthropic partners to discuss readiness, adaptation, measurement, and long-term sustainability from the beginning rather than after dollars had already been committed.
At the same time, important questions remain. The partnership created momentum, but momentum isn’t the same as institutional change. The real test is whether states embed evidence preferences into future budget cycles once the advance commitment expires. Will the community colleges that adopted ASAP sustain those practices if external funding ends? Will the school districts that piloted Saga tutoring have the infrastructure to continue it? We are working closely with state and local partners, including the Maryland State Department of Education, to identify opportunities to sustain program implementation beyond the partnership, but the work is hard. Embedding new norms into agencies and procurement systems is slower, less visible, and harder to sustain across administrations than any single partnership.
Future Directions
The State Partnership for Proven Programs is not a panacea. It is one approach to a persistent problem: how to help governments use limited resources more effectively by aligning spending with evidence of effectiveness. Its core insight is that evidence alone is not enough. It must be paired with incentives, shared commitment, and respect for state decision-making.
For philanthropies, the model suggests a role that goes beyond funding individual programs. By using advance commitments strategically, philanthropy can help governments take informed risks and unlock public investment in solutions that have a strong chance of improving outcomes.
For policy makers and practitioners, the model offers a new way to move evidence from the margins to the center of budget decisions. And for the broader social sector, it underscores the value of collaboration across government, philanthropy, and communities to scale solutions. Maryland is the first state to launch a partnership based on this model, but it is not the last. Similar collaborations have launched in Colorado, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
Investing in what works starts with working together. When partners align around evidence, share responsibility, and commit resources upfront, public dollars can go further and do more good. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model won’t solve every problem in social spending. But it does offer a practical lesson: Evidence doesn’t move budgets on its own. It needs an on-ramp, one that keeps public leaders in the driver’s seat while changing the incentives around what gets funded. We have more proof than ever of what can change people’s lives. The task now is finding the will—and the partners—to fund it.
Read more stories by Justin Milner, Jonny Dorsey & Jon Baron.