Save a Million seeks to help turn preventable cycles of premature death and debt into life and cost-saving cycles.

Responding to deadly incidents is very expensive with high healthcare and other costs, such as for justice and prison costs in response to each homicide. With hundreds of thousands of premature deaths per country, these costs are enormous. Standard response costs cannot be avoided after an incident, so they are not cut in times of austerity to reduce debt and deficit.

Some prevention programs not only save lives, they also cost a lot less than responding after each incident. Despite this there are fewer grants available for them in times of recession and spiralling debt, so preventable death and debt rise further. Even in times of budget surplus many effective prevention programs are trapped in captivity: relying on ‘capped activity’ grants which are small, periodic and unconnected to any savings they generate.

A new option emerged from the Global Financial Crisis: re-invest a portion of the savings successful programs create. The initial Pay for Success approaches took too long to negotiate and didn’t lead to further re-investments, so some governments have since started to issue Outcomes Rate Cards and Contracts which put a value on preventing some types of harmful incidents. To date these rates have not covered saving lives, so the next step is for life and cost-saving program providers to develop Savings Cards and Contracts to enable re-investment in them.

Save a Million is a new solution for proven prevention programs which achieve savings of a million dollars or more for ‘Saver Entities’ per outcome set and could save a million years of life if enough of those Saver Entities reinvested an agreed portion of savings in them. Our initial focus is on Urban Violence.