Performance Report
All of CTOP’s organizational development work with our grantee partners is in pursuit of our north star, which is to help young people change their lives by successfully reconnecting to education and gainful employment on a pathway to self-sufficiency. Before organizations can consistently produce these outcomes for young people, they must build their capacities and competencies to be able to do their work effectively, reliably, and sustainably, which requires an organizational investment of time and energy measured in years, not weeks or months. And because the obstacles that our young people face are extensive and complex, our grantee partners often work with young people for multiple years before they are ready to graduate successfully from their programs. For both of these reasons, we do not expect partners to generate the kinds of long-term outcomes we ultimately care about in the first few years of our work together, but we are starting to see those outcomes now.
Succeeding in Education and Employment
As CTOP now approaches the midway point of implementing its ten-year social investment strategy, we can begin to take stock of our grantee partners’ growing track record of performance relative to our north star. CTOP’s Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that provides the ultimate measure of our grantee partners’ success and the value of our partnership, and for which CTOP holds itself accountable in terms of monitoring its own performance, is the number of CTOP target population youth who are still actively engaged in school or work 12 months following their graduation from a CTOP grantee partner’s programming. In aggregate, across our grantee partners, the number of young people attaining this critical milestone in 2023-24 was 178 – which represents 85% of all young people who graduated from their programs in the previous year (see Figure 1).
For all of our grantee partners, their definition of program graduation requires that a young person has graduated high school, enrolled in post-secondary education or educational training, or secured employment, which means that CTOP’s KPI of the number of young people graduating from our grantee partners’ programming reflects not simply an output but a critical outcome. In 2023-24, the number of young people graduating from our grantee partners’ programming was 201, up from 137 in 2022-23.
What Are Young People Getting from their Programs?
As a proxy for how many young people currently being served by a program are likely to graduate, and to subsequently sustain their education or employment 12 months following program graduation, CTOP uses a KPI called the active program slot. To be considered in an active program slot, a young person must meet the program’s enrollment criteria and receive the kinds and levels of services and supports that the organization’s theory of change identifies as required to ensure that young person ultimately achieves its promised long-term outcomes. In contrast to looking at the number of individuals served by a program, which is commonly used as a metric in the social services sector, the active program slot metric tells us what young people are actually getting from a program, and can therefore serve as an indicator of whether they are likely to truly benefit from it.
In each year of implementing CTOP’s ten-year social investment strategy, the number of active program slots that our grantee partners have produced in aggregate has climbed steadily, reaching 1,147 in 2023-24 (see Figure 2) – even as some of our grantee partners have not yet reached the stage of organizational development where they are producing active program slots. The number of active program slots delivered in any given year continues to be significantly higher than the numbers of young people graduating from their programs and achieving long-term outcomes. These data align with our expectations because youth participate for multiple years in the programming of most of our grantee partners, which by definition means that only a fraction of youth enrolled in active program slots in any given year would be expected to have made the progress necessary to graduate in that year.