Social Impact Bonds: If They're Good Enough For Goldman Sachs...

I'm not sold on the idea, being more of a John Wesley, "Earn all you can, Save all you can, Give all you can" kind of guy, but who am I to judge those who claim to do "God's Work"?
From the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Study Offers Advice on Setting Up Social-Impact Bonds

Social-impact bonds, an emerging and controversial way to finance programs run by nonprofits and government, are examined in a new report by the Urban Institute.

The in-depth study offers advice on how juvenile and criminal-justice systems can develop such deals. Later this year the think tank will release a tool to help government agencies and investors determine whether a project is right for such financing.

Sometimes referred to as pay-for-success contracts, social-impact bonds allow private investors to pay for a social program that has performance goals, such as reducing the number of ex-offenders who return to jail. If an independent evaluator certifies that the program meets the goals, the government returns the investors’ capital and pays them a return on their investment.

The first social-impact bond in the United States started in 2012, when Goldman Sachs invested $9.6-million to provide services to young offenders in New York City to help them stay in school, find and keep a job, and avoid future incarceration. Since then, other states and cities have developed similar financing deals.

Complex and Expensive
Social-impact bonds have the potential to expand proven approaches to tough problems, says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the new report.

"We find that an intervention works with a difficult population, and then we never get beyond serving 2 percent of that population," he says. "What social-impact bonds and pay-for-success do is potentially unlock the capital that’s necessary to make that big leap from the pilot stage to the business-as-usual stage."...MORE

Here are a couple Goldmanites writing for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

Rikers Island: The First Social Impact Bond in the United States
(5 page PDF)

Here's Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein back in November 2009 having been bailed out by both Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury via the AIG no-haircut payoffs:
Goldman Sachs’ Blankfein on Banking: ‘Doing God’s Work’
Here's Wesley's Sermon 50, The Use of Money (1744)