VOL. 8 – December 15, 2022

As 2022 draws to a close, Summit Consulting would like to wish all of our clients, staff, and friends a very joyous holiday season and a happy new year. We’ve provided some of our 2022 highlights below:

• Summit had a solid year of about 80 distinct awards, modifications, and follow-ons.​
• These awards typify Summit’s mission statement to deliver data-driven solutions to help make government effective and society just.​
• Nearly 100% of Summit’s awards came from bipartisan federal programs to strengthen our nation or nonprofit clients. Summit played a vital role in a record number of engagements that had real and lasting impacts on our society.​
• These impacts are something that we should all take pride in and which could only be accomplished with hard work and collaborative teamwork.

Thank you for another wonderful year!

Watch Summit’s Webinar on Program Evaluation

Summit hosted a live webinar on October 6 featuring our experts talking about program evaluation. The experts drew on their real-life project experience to discuss the different types of program evaluations, how to design cost-effective evaluations, the advantages and challenges of qualitative and quantitative methods, and what’s happening right now in evidence building across the federal government, including interagency efforts to advance programs and policies.

Check out more key takeaways and valuable insights, plus watch the webinar for free on the Summit blog.

Summit hosting a panel at the 2023 ACES Emerge Conference

Summit senior consultant Melissa Cichantek will join Kim Cragg, managing editor at the Department of Veterans Affairs, to discuss editing for and in the government. Their presentation will cover common issues in government editing, fighting red-tape burnout, approaching and reducing jargon, working with in-house and external government clients, and more.

Summit presented at Maryland Governor’s Grants Office 2022 Conference

Summit consultant Lydia Kidder gave a presentation on November 18 that explored universal concepts in the Office of Management and Budget’s 2020 publication The Performance Management Playbook for Federal Awarding Agencies. Attendees learned about the importance and utility of performance management principles to assist grantors in telling the story of their grant.

Summit attended the 2022 OFN Conference in New York City

Summit director Sarah Cunningham moderated a panel on October 20 that focused on how philanthropic foundations and community development financial institutions (CDFIs) can work together to close the racial wealth gap. Panelists included the California Endowment, Living Cities, and Google.org.

Summit Director Publishes Article on Public-Private Partnerships in Federal Budget IQ

On November 22, Summit director Sarah Cunningham published an article titled “Public-Private Partnerships—Opportunities to Advance Infrastructure and Climate Goals,” in which she talks about the importance of strong public-private partnerships, or P3s, to leverage public- and private-sector strengths to advance infrastructure and climate goals while simultaneously reducing government outlays.

The article has been reproduced in full on the Summit blog, and you can read it here.

What’s New on Federal Credit Fridays

Episode 12: Summit Manager Kayla Andriate Talks Annual Reestimates

Andriate, a manager at Summit Consulting, discusses performing cohort-level reestimates for programs with thousands of homogeneous loans, which requires statistical and econometric techniques. 

Episode 13: Aaron Snyder of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Corps Water Infrastructure Financing Program

Snyder discusses the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Corps Water Infrastructure Financing Program (CWIFP), which enables local investment in infrastructure projects that address community water resource needs, promote economic prosperity, and improve environmental quality. Snyder is the interim director of CWIFP as well as the P3 Program director. 

Missed an episode? Listen to past Federal Credit Fridays here.

About Federal Credit Fridays: The U.S. government is one of the largest lenders and credit guarantors on earth. Its portfolio is estimated at over $3.6 trillion, as measured by loan assets and the face value of loan guarantees. The government uses credit for a wide variety of policy missions, including housing, higher education, small businesses, rural and urban economic development, infrastructure, and export promotion, among others. This podcast will familiarize you with the vast world of federal credit, and we hope that you’ll learn about similarities and differences between these programs as well as the importance of their work to achieving policy missions within the framework of public-private collaboration.

Summit Forms North Star Joint Venture with SoftDev Incorporated and NuvoLogic Consulting 

Summit is proud to announce we’ve created another joint venture, North Star, with SoftDev Incorporated and NuvoLogic Consulting. Summit director Kate Lynch Machado says, “SoftDev, NuvoLogic, and Summit are each already known for their strengths and skills in their markets, and the formation of the North Star joint venture offers us an outstanding opportunity to navigate towards sustainable growth, new experiences, and new connections.”

Visit the newly launched website at northstar-us.com to learn more about who we are, the work we do, and our leadership.

We have some exciting news to share: Summit has a new home! Located down the street from our former office, our new office is in the heart of DC’s Chinatown neighborhood, and it will be a hub for collaboration, fresh ideas, and Summit culture. We can’t wait for everyone to visit us at 777 6th Street NW, Suite 520. And don't worry, our phone numbers remain the same.

Our Newest Case Studies

Fraud Detection Support for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

FEMA administers programs that provide monetary assistance to people and entities impacted by disasters. These programs are hindered by fraudulent requests for funding, so FEMA contracted the Summit team to assist in strengthening the agency’s existing fraud detection infrastructure through accurately depicting the process flow of application data and finding additional fraud identifiers.

Curious about our other case studies? See more here.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Childcare Study

Summit will support HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research in conducting the HUD-HHS Childcare Study. Summit and its partners on this effort, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and Child Trends, will complete a number of different research activities to assist HUD in understanding the preferences of HUD-assisted families and their access to on-site childcare.

U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid (FSA) NextGen

Summit was awarded the option year contract to continue providing program management support for FSA’s NextGen Program Office and Student Aid and Borrower Eligibility Reform (SABER) initiative. Summit supports the modernization of FSA’s IT systems and business processes underpinning the delivery of federal aid to millions of students each year through risk management, schedule management, acquisition management, communications, and process improvement support.

HUD, Risk Management and Capital Assessment Projections (RMCAP)

For the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Summit was awarded a 6-month bridge contract for RMCAP.  This contract, which we have had since 2014, is currently under recompete. These two wins keep us as the incumbent for a prominent modeling engagement used for credit subsidy, annual report capital adequacy assessment, loan loss guarantee for financial statements, and numerous policy analyses, such as determining premiums.

HUD, Community Planning Development – Section 108 (Cloudburst)

Summit was awarded a contract to update default curves for the Section 108 program’s subsidy estimation. This is follow-on work from the original curve estimation and previous update. HUD’s Section 108 program provides Community Development Block Grant recipients with the ability to leverage their annual grant allocation to access low-cost, flexible financing for economic development, housing, public facility, and infrastructure projects.

State of Montana, Department of Administration

Summit is leading stakeholder engagement efforts to understand broadband access and digital equity gaps in Montana. The data Summit collects through this outreach will inform action plans submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment and Digital Equity Programs.

Fannie Mae, Model Risk Management Model Validation

Summit signed a 6-month contract to support Fannie Mae’s Model Risk Management group. We will be supporting a variety of model validations in R and Python.

Nathan Cummings Foundation, Program-Related Investment Underwriting

Summit will provide underwriting support for a program-related investment to the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a national foundation based in New York City focused on social and racial equity programs.

American Heart Association, National Hypertension Initiative Evaluation

Tasks were added to Summit’s Option Year 1 statement of work, including survey programming, reporting, and stakeholder interviews.

HUD, Office of Single-Family Claims Branch, Data Management Support

Summit will work as a subcontractor to NuvoLogic in supporting HUD’s Single Family Claims Branch data management effort by contributing to business process improvements and assessments, database consolidation and cleanup, modernization of databases and tools, and testing of databases and tools.

Missed a newsletter? Read past editions in the archive.