For more than five years, the HEART/NSTA Trust has been steadily rebuilding the way it funds its training partners. On April 1, 2026, that work reached its turning point: Results-Based Funding (RBF) moved out of its pilot phase and into full implementation, opening the 2026/2027 financial year on a milestone years in the making.
The shift answers a straightforward question the Trust set itself — is every dollar invested in a partnership returning real value? Through much of 2020–2021, most operating funding for training partnerships flowed through subventions: block grants that too often produced low returns in the areas that matter most, from certification and employment to career advancement and business opportunities. RBF was designed to change that, replacing a patchwork of funding arrangements with a single system that applies the same criteria to every partner and ties the release of funding to the outputs partners actually deliver.
Getting there took patience. Over five years and five months, the Trust piloted the benchmarked model and brought partners on board in deliberate, phased cohorts rather than all at once — testing, refining, and building confidence at each step.
The results now speak for themselves. As at June 29, 2026, 43 Community Training Interventions (CTIs) had successfully transitioned to the RBF model through finalized Results-Based Funding agreements — 69.35% of the entire CTI portfolio, comfortably clearing the 60% transition target set for the fiscal year. Those partnerships span the first and second pilot cohorts, along with nineteen institutions that joined during the first year of full implementation.
For each of these organizations, the move from the subvention model to RBF is more than an administrative change. It places them within a performance-focused framework built on accountability, measurable outcomes, and stronger value for stakeholders — and it sets the pace for the partners still to come.