The Social Innovation Public Service Fund inaugurated a new executive leadership team at the start of February, aiming to continue its steady expansion despite difficulties in raising awareness.

The SIPS Fund was founded in 2012 as a $1.5 million student-run endowment used to fund student and alumni projects with significant social impact. Applicants for grants were evaluated by the SIPS leadership team, which decides whether to fund the projects and how much funding each project should receive. Available funding comes from the interest the endowment earns.

While SIPS Executive Director Naman Trivedi (SFS ’16) will continue into a second yearlong term, Nirmal Maitra (NHS ’17) replaced Anna Frenzilli (COL ’16) as the managing director and Allison Heymann (SFS ’16) replaced Kyle Rice (SFS ’16) as the operations director.

Heymann said that her reasoning for becoming involved with SIPS was tied to ensuring Georgetown remained unique and forward-looking in its social impact.

“I want to … help guide, mentor and encourage these kinds of students, the ones who are looking to mix up the social, cultural and academic aspects of the university,” Heymann wrote in an email.

Trivedi said that the past year has seen significant expansion of the fund’s activities, adding new initiatives such as a summer scholarship to supplement students on high-impact, unpaid internships. The program also gave out all available funding for the first time in its existence.

“I think some of the biggest changes are that we’ve gotten a lot more innovative in our programming. Before, SIPS only had a single model in its approach, or how it involved students,” Trivedi said.

Over the past year, the organization has forged partnerships with numerous organizations around campus, including the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, Students of Georgetown, Inc. and the Alternative Breaks Program.

Trivedi highlighted the osmosis between SIPS and the various organizations as critical to forming a culture of entrepreneurship and creativity around campus. While most students find out about SIPS through its website, others find the program as a result of its on-campus partnerships.

“Sometimes we have students come to us, and we realize they may not be within our funding model, so we’ll send them to the Beeck Center or Corp Philanthropy,” Trivedi said. “And in that same fashion, we’ve had projects come to us through the Beck Center and other organizations in campus. … What we’re all trying to do is build an entrepreneurial ecosystem on campus.”

One of the fund’s new leadership’s major goals is expansion, so they can guide and mentor more Georgetown students. To do so, the fund will begin soliciting additional donations.

“In a little while, we want to approach donors and other non-profits to see if they’d be interested in giving a lump sum of money to SIPS so that we could fund our students,” Trivedi said.

In addition, the fund has plans to help connect students to non-profits in Washington. Trivedi also noted that helping more students generate grant proposals would be a focus for SIPS in the future.

“Our primary function is to give out grants and evaluate projects that students are applying to us for funding,” Trivedi said. “But we really want to get in the field of incubation to help students really form their ideas.”

One of the projects on which SIPS recently embarked and which could serve as a model for further expansion is a summer program in Burkina Faso called CERAP. Named after the Centre de Recherche et d’Action Pour la Paix, the Jesuit institution which SIPS partnered with for the program, the initiative aims to take some of the burden off of students who want to go abroad but are unable to fully develop a project on their own.

“It’s hard for a lot of students to come with a full grant idea and apply for funding, so we kind of created these avenues for students to get involved in social impact and innovation through programming that we had,” Trivedi said.

The crux of the fund’s activities, however, is the grants which it gives out, having funded over $100,000 in student and alumni projects since its creation. Rice said that the organization is once again receiving a strong show of applications.

“Just leading up to this next round of funding we already have quite a large show of interest in terms of people applying for grants,” Rice said.

SIPS generally gets fewer than ten applications during the fall and winter funding cycles but receives more applications in the summer months. Last summer the organization broke the record for most grantees funded in a round, granting around $25,000 to nine groups and seven individual scholars.

“The future looks promising with each funding round,” Rice said.

Most summer projects with SIPS are students going abroad to do service-oriented work. Some applicants are from student groups, like the Alternative Breaks Program, and some are from non-profits and small businesses that students have started themselves.

“There isn’t really a cookie cutter mold for SIPS applicants,” Rice said. “We just want to hear your ideas, and we’ll work with you.”