Belmont Resident to be honored by RFK Children's Action Corps

In 2011, Tracy Palandjian co-founded Social Finance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mobilizing capital to drive social progress. Since then, Tracy and her team have built the Pay for Success field in the United States, uniting uncommon partners around a common goal – to measurably improve the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.

For her commitment to pioneering new tools to help communities most in need, The Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps is honoring Tracy Palandjian with the organization’s Embracing the Legacy award at the JFK Library in Boston on June 1.

Pay for Success is a new public finance model which sits at the intersection of impact investing and policymaking. Pay for Success projects generate a return on investment by creating efficiency inside government - by investing in prevention and focusing on outcomes - and then sharing in the value created by improving peoples’ lives. Whether they are focused on helping mothers in poverty achieve healthy births or supporting immigrants and refugees with job training, Pay for Success projects mobilize capital to drive social progress and re-direct government resources from outputs to outcomes.

As CEO of Social Finance, Tracy Palandjian applies the lessons she learned from her grandfather about the importance of hard work and putting oneself in other people’s shoes. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Palandjian has called the U.S. home since she arrived at Milton Academy, where Robert F. Kennedy went to high school decades before. Palandjian graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and holds an M.B.A. with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She worked at The Parthenon Group, Wellington Management Co., and McKinsey & Co before founding Social Finance. Palandjian serves on the boards of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, Surdna Foundation, Affiliated Managers Group, is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s New England Community Development Advisory Council, and is Vice Chair of the Board of Overseers at Harvard University.

“Robert F. Kennedy once said of the GDP that it 'measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile'. Pay for Success flips this on its head by measuring what we value as a society, instead of valuing what we can easily measure,” says Palandjian. “At Social Finance, we put this into practice by enlisting private capital in pursuit of positive outcomes, such as improving economic mobility and closing the achievement gap. Our projects begin to make tangible the benefits of a life better lived.”

The Pay for Success model has grown to more than 100 projects in 24 countries, tackling many of the same social causes core to the mission of the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps. On the 50th anniversary of the passing of Robert F. Kennedy, for whom the nonprofit was named, the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps embarks upon its fifth decade of service to Massachusetts’ most vulnerable youth. The organization is a national leader in developing and implementing model, successful child welfare, social service and juvenile justice programs.