The Invisible Heart (2018)

The relatively new concept of the Social Impact Bond (SIB) is presented. Rather than purely profit motivated as are most investments, SIBs have their financial backers investing in some sort of social good, with financial return on investment from some pre-established set of metrics measuring success, which are often in lieu of future opportunity costs if the program funded by the SIB was not undertaken. A hypothetical example would be investing in prevention of some negative health issue to avoid future costs to the health care system if that person indeed became ill from that health issue. The pros, cons and challenges of SIBs are presented, two of the major issues in that latter category being trying to find those common measures between solely social good versus financial good, and what happens to that social issue if it is purely driven by the profit motive. The one item that all would probably agree is that SIBs generally do not deal well or at all with the root causes of those social problems, which are usually related to poverty and disparity. And one question arising is what happens to the role of government, which exists in part to deal with those social issues. Three programs in various stages of the SIB process are shown: a SIB in Chicago that invests in preschool education in a relatively poor, crime ridden, and predominantly black neighborhood; an existing program to house the chronically homeless in Toronto under consideration as a SIB; and a new program under discussion between the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian government through the Public Health Agency of Canada to tackle the issue of hypertension especially among the at-risk population.