Insiders to Hear from White House Office of Social Innovation

It is in some ways difficult to sense what is real and what is smoke in all of President Obama's new projects, programs and legislative proposals, since so much of the details seemed to be uncompleted. I fear, however, that most of these projects etc. are real and will have a major impact on the economy and our lives.

The latest Obama program taking a bit of a higher profile is the White House Office of Social Innovation.

PEU Report comments on Business Week's Steve Hamm bleg for anyone who has questions for certain speakers at the upcoming Aspen Global Leadership Network conference. The chairman of the Aspen Institute is, of course, a former Goldman Sachs man, Robert K. Steel, and PEU Report does a nice job bringing up a few questions for Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein's planned appearance at the event.

But, what also caught my eye, was the high profile mention by Hamm of Sonal Shah, the newly appointed head of the White House Office of Social Innovation. WTF?

Shah, naturally, has a stint at Goldman Sachs on her resume, and also at Google where she was head of global development for Google.org, the search engine's philanthropic arm. She was also on Obama's transition project's advisory board and co-chair of the technology working group.

Back in February, when the idea of the Office of Social Innovation was being worked out, she was quoted as saying:

We didn't want innovation to be limited only to technology innovation. Let's not just make it innovation in terms of broadband or something like that, but also innovation in terms of what civil society is doing.

According to Chronicles of Philanthropy:

Members of President Obama’s transition team proposed creating an Office of Social Innovation to promote government efforts to help innovative nonprofit groups and social entrepreneurs expand successful approaches to tackling pressing social problems

Social entrepreneurs are words the president used in his speech in Cairo to the Muslim world.

Of course, there is a new fund associated with this new office. Here's Chronicles of Philanthropy, again:

The office will no doubt be involved in the Social Innovation Funds pilot program that was just created by the Serve America Act, a national-service bill...The funds, which will be administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, will provide money for groups that are “developing innovative and effective solutions to national and local challenges.”

I think this is a new OFG or Obama Favored Group. It's Wall Street donors to Obama, headed by Goldman and Carlyle, unions, and left wing philanthropic organizations.