NOTE: As of 12/2/08, we have withdrawn all formal recommendations for charities focused on Employment Assistance (Cause 5) due to our view that organizations in other causes achieve superior results. For more information, see this table.

We examined 19 organizations' evidence that they can help disadvantaged adults get and hold jobs paying enough to support them at a reasonable standard of living. We start with the strongest organizations in this cause, followed by a brief summary of our reasoning, followed by more detail.

Stronger organizations

This cause involves a crucial judgment call between what we call "helping those with greater need" and "helping those with more earning potential." Helping those with greater need refers to helping unemployed, or severely underemployed, people to get jobs paying in the range of $10 per hour; helping those with more earning potential refers to helping people transition from lower-skill to higher-skill jobs.

Helping those with greater need

1. The HOPE Program serves an extremely high-need population, with multiple issues from substance abuse to past convictions, and places about 30% of its clients sustainably in jobs paying in the $10/hr range. We aren't fully confident about what HOPE provides that its clients couldn't get otherwise, but its results appear very strong for the population it works with.
   
   
2. The Vocational Foundation serves underemployed and undereducated youth, and places about 60% sustainably in jobs paying in the $10/hr range. While we think that HOPE does more to improve its clients chances of finding and holding a low-wage low-skill job, the available evidence suggests to us that the Vocational Foundation is improving its clients' lives beyond what they could likely accomplish without its help.

Helping those with more earning potential

1. Year Up seeks out people who are young and low-income but motivated (fewer than 1 in 3 applicants are accepted), and puts them in a 6-month training course followed by a 6-month internship, aiming to place them in Computer Support and Investment Operations roles that pay around $20/hr.

   Although it is an expensive program and we do not have as much data on outcomes as we would like, we recommend Year Up because (a) its clients end up with wages that are truly self-supporting; (b) it is relatively clear to us that Year Up provides a path to these wages that clients wouldn't have otherwise; (c) we are confident in Year Up's ability to expand and serve more people as it draws more funding. We estimate that Year Up places someone sustainably (at least 12 months) in a self-supporting job for every $50,000 it spends.
   
   

2. St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corp serves low-income people in North Brooklyn with a variety of programs, including a Skills Training program that provides highly specific, targeted, certification-based training. By offering training for a number of different possible careers - from low-paying but plentiful Culinary Services jobs to high-paying Environmental Remediation Technician jobs - St. Nick's aims to get everyone in need earning as much as they can.
   
   We recommend St. Nick's because (a) it aims to serve everyone in need, yet also provides paths for the most able and willing to become truly self-supporting; (b) it is relatively clear to us that it is giving its clients opportunities they wouldn't have otherwise. Our data on St. Nick's is extremely limited, particularly outside of its Skills Training programs, and we have slightly more confidence in Year Up as a proven, expandable organization. We estimate that St. Nick's Environmental Remediation Technician program spends about $12,000 per sustainable placement, but are not confident about what more funding would allow it to accomplish.
   
   
3. Highbridge Community Life Center serves an extremely low-income community in the Bronx, and like St. Nick's it offers a variety of programs targeted at different groups; these include a very well-documented Nurse Aide Training Program that helps low-income people become certified Nurse Aides, although we have little documentation on other programs.

   Highbridge's Nurse Aide Training doesn't currently prepare clients for very high-paying jobs, but a new Phlebotomy program aims to do just that. Given Highbridge's strong self-documentation, we are optimistic about recommending Highbridge more strongly in the future.

We do not have enough confidence in our other finalists' effects - above and beyond how their clients would do without help - to recommend them strongly.

Reasoning in brief

We invited 57 organizations to apply, including all we could identify that have strong reputations among NYC foundations. 19 submitted applications; we chose our 7 finalists based on which organizations provided evidence of long-term life impact (i.e., whether people were not only placed on jobs but retained them - details here). The following table lays out our summary picture of our seven finalists:

Overview table of finalists

• In no case were we convinced that a finalist can "turn around" the lives of all or most of the people who come to it for help. The numbers we saw were consistent with the idea that these programs generally benefit a minority of the people who approach them - those who are already willing and able to work.
• Because each program serves such a different population, we caution against reading too much into differences in their outcomes, such as "percent of clients sustainably placed" and "cost per sustainable placement." We have recommended only organizations that we feel somewhat confident are making their clients better off than they would be otherwise; in deciding between recommended organizations, we have largely used the other principles listed here.
• In no case did an organization provide an extremely strong empirical case that it makes its applicants better off than they would be otherwise. Such a case would involve tracking outcomes not just for clients, but also for a "comparison group" of similar people who did not go through the program. We did our best to construct our own very rough comparison group data, which implied minor effects for Year Up and VFI and a strong effect for HOPE.
• GiveWell's staff and Board had a significant difference of opinion on the major judgment call of "helping those with greater need" and "helping those with more earning potential." Our difference is a difference in intuitions; without an empirical way of settling the question, we've opted to separate our recommended charities along the lines of this judgment call.
  • Some feel that the largest hurdle for a disadvantaged adult is going from unemployed to employed, and that a program lasting several months (as VFI and HOPE do) could help many people to take the simple steps necessary to get over this hurdle.
  • Others are concerned that low-skill, low-wage jobs are not truly self-supporting (see our cost of living analysis), are unlikely to lead to higher wages, and require little qualification other than motivation - and therefore see high-skill jobs, as a greater opportunity for a charity to cause significant, lasting life change.

We recommend HOPE as the best option for those interested in helping people with greater need. Its documentation and evaluation is extremely strong, and implies that it is placing people in jobs at a much greater rate than might be expected otherwise. We aren't quite as impressed by VFI's results as by HOPE's, but we do believe it has demonstrated that it is making its clients better off than they would be otherwise, and therefore merits our recommendation.

Within the category of helping people with more earning potential, our top choice is Year Up, largely because it (a) targets very high-skill, high-paying jobs; (b) has demonstrated a replicable model, and can likely help more people with more funding. St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corp. also has programs targeting high-paying jobs, with limited data implying strong results, although we have less confidence in the organization as a whole. We find Highbridge to be a strong organization that may better match our goals in the future (if and when it provides more options for job training, particularly higher-income jobs).

More detail

A few terms

• Enrollees are those who enroll in a program.
• Graduates are those who complete the program; the attrition rate between enrollees and graduates can be quite high.
• Placements refers to graduates placed in jobs.
• Retention refers to the length of time that a person placed in a job retained that job. (A "12-month retention rate" is the percentage of people placed in jobs who retained those same jobs as of 12 months later).
• Sustainable placements refers to graduates who were not only placed in jobs, but who appeared to retain these jobs for a significant amount of time, based on followup reports from the charity in question. Unless otherwise specified, a "sustainable placement" refers to a person who was placed in a job that they retained for at least 12 months.

Goal of the cause

We set out to fund significant life change for economically disadvantaged adults, focusing on employment assistance programs in New York City. The most promising and most significant form of life change we generally expect from these programs is to enable clients who are not self-supporting to become fully self-supporting, with a reasonable standard of living. This means placing clients sustainably (we define a "sustainable placement" as a case in which a client holds a job for at least 12 months) in jobs that are likely to be able to support them fully (or to give them the opportunity to move up

Overview of finalists

The programs we reviewed are generally similar in structure: they enroll low-income people in training classes, then help them obtain employment, and in many cases follow up with them after placing them in jobs (both to see how they're doing and to track their outcomes). They differ, however, on:

• Program intensity. Programs range from 1-2 weeks to 6 months followed by 6-month internships.
• Population served. Some serve all comers, including those with extreme challenges; others use competitive application processes to pick out the most motivated people they can find; and others achieve self-selection by focusing on very specific career paths.
• Types of jobs. Many programs place clients in low-paying ($8-12/hr jobs); others aim to place them in jobs paying up to $20/hr, with paths to higher earnings.

The following table lays out our summary picture of our seven finalists:

Overview table of finalists

Principles

Our decisions are based on the following principles:

Focus on sustainable employment.

Graduating from a program is not the same as benefiting from it. As you can see on individual organizations' pages, placement rates and retention rates vary dramatically from organization to organization. Over the last two years, 75% of the people placed by CCCS were no longer employed 6 months later; even higher-retention programs such as The HOPE program still see attrition from around 25% of those placed in jobs.

In order to have any confidence in an organization, we need a sense not just of how many people it serves or how many people it places in jobs, but how many of the people it places stay employed for a significant period of time. We have generally used 12-month retention as our proxy for "sustainable employment," although this information is not available for CCCS (in the table above, we instead give the 6-month retention number).

All of our finalists gave us at least a reasonable sense of how many sustainable placements they make, for at least one of their programs. None of our non-finalists did.

Not all clients need significant help.

We suspect that a motivated enough person, even with low income and education, can find employment without help from a charity (or with very minimal help, rather than an extensive program). We would guess that this is particularly true for low-skill, low-wage jobs, such as those that CCCS/HOPE/Covenant/VFI clients are placed in. Since many of these motivated people also wind up in the programs we're reviewing, it's hard to tell how much of their success in eventually finding a job we should attribute to the program as opposed to the motivated participant.

While we think that its impact is probably most significant for programs that focus on low-skill, low-wage jobs, we suspect that selection bias effects all of the programs we reviewed to some degree. Since none of the programs gave us a strong sense for how their clients would likely do without their help, we madesome attempts of our own to differentiate between the contributions of the program and the inherent abilities of the participants; but in general, good information on this question was not available. We used census data to construct rough comparison groups for VFI and Year Up, finding small evidence for the effects of both; we compared The HOPE Program to other programs serving similar populations, and the numbers imply a large effect for the HOPE Program, though we are wary of placing too much confidence in these numbers (see the HOPE page for details).

We do not have an internal consensus on whether to help those with greater need or help those with greater earning potential.

It's hard to compare the value added by pulling someone out of extreme poverty and into an $8/hr job to the value added by helping someone move from poverty wages to around $20/hr. While the former may have more obvious impacts in the employed person's life (such as getting the person off of the street), we don't think that $8/hr provides a living wage in New York City and such low paying jobs (security guards etc.) usually require few valuable skills and have little opportunity for advancement. On the other hand, moving someone from $10/hr to $20/hr usually involves giving them valuable skills and a real shot at overcoming poverty all together, but isn't a matter of life and death for the employed person.

We're split on which approach is best, and we aren't entirely certain that this is an issue we can resolve through further research and debate. That said, we feel confident in saying that both approaches add significant value to the lives of employment program participants, even if we can't say which one adds the most value.

We prefer to give where further funding is needed and can be productively used.

On one hand, we are against the practice of restricting grants; we see this as micromanagement, and believe that a good charity should know more about how to use its funds than we do. But when choosing between charities, we have tried to consider where our money is needed and can be productively used, a difficult endeavor when dealing with large and complex organizations.

Year Up is the organization whose ability to scale is clearest to us. It already runs sites in Boston, Providence, D.C., and New York, and has been rapidly expanding over the last few years (see its individual page for details). We believe that more funding can translate into more people served by the same model (although our confidence is moderate rather than high, since the only site with strong outcomes data is the original Boston site).

St. Nick's recently piloted two new types of Skills Training programs - a Commercial Truck Driver program and a Culinary Skills program - and mentions the wish to pilot several more (see its individual page for details). The workforce development component of its budget has grown significantly over the past couple of years, and based on this, it seems likely to us that an influx of funding could mean more rapid development and broader reach for these programs.

With other applicants, we have relatively little sense of what an influx of funds would mean, although we imagine that in most cases a large enough influx would cause them to at least attempt expanding and serving more people.

The bottom line

All of our recommended charities made a reasonably strong – though not extremely compelling – case to us that they are providing a life-changing benefit that clients would not otherwise have access to. They did so using data, logic, or a combination.

Helping those with greater need

The HOPE Program is extremely impressive both in terms of its documentation and evaluation – it keeps highly thorough and detailed data that demonstrate how its clients perform after graduating the program – and the results themselves, which show 30% of an extremely challenged population being placed sustainably in jobs.

The Vocational Foundation is also impressive along these dimensions, though not as compelling to us as HOPE. Its documentation and evaluation is second-strongest in the cause, and from a few different pieces of evidence (see its individual review page for details) we would bet that it is making a significant difference in clients' lives.

Helping those with greater earning potential

The Skills Training programs offered by St. Nick's provide a simple, straightforward benefit that is easy for us to understand and leads in many cases to a true living wage. Conceptually and intuitively, these are the programs that make the most sense to us: targeting specific people who can benefit from specific kinds of help, in many cases leading to relatively high wages. However, our data on St. Nick's outcomes is extremely limited even for these programs, and we have even less information about the organization as a whole.

Year Up is more intensive and expensive than St. Nick's, and we wonder whether the latter gets similar results (low-income people made self-supporting) for less, by focusing on people whose needs are specific and simple. However, it is still fairly easy for us to see Year Up's value-added, since it prepares clients for jobs that require a fair amount of specific knowledge (and may require Year Up's corporate connections as well). And we have a better understanding of Year Up's overall strategy, past activities, and ability to serve more people with more money. Recognizing the arguments both ways, at this point we feel more comfortable betting on Year Up's ability to translate donations into lives changed.

We also recommend Highbridge, because it follows a similar model to St. Nick's; has excellent self-documentation and -evaluation; and is planning to start offering programs targeted at more high-income jobs.

The full details

The links on the left give our full writeups on finalists, as well as our criteria for choosing finalists, and should make the basis for all of our above claims clear.

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  Our Overview table of finalists (xls) provides this data for charities we reviewed.