On the day a program ends, a young person holding a certificate of completion asks the counselor a question, they say. Whether he may come here next week too. The set number of sessions is over, so the answer is usually no. From the following week, he is alone again.
Programs supporting young people who have experienced isolation and reclusion have been run in a number of regions. And the share who returned to isolation after completing those programs is put at 58.8%. It means that close to six out of ten went back to where they had been once the support stopped.
Should this figure be read as a failure? Reading it that way is accurate. The ones who failed are not the young people. The way success was defined failed.
The performance of support programs for young people experiencing isolation is generally tallied by employment rate and completion rate. Get a job and it counts as success, fail to and it counts as no result. Within this method of calculation, changes such as "I went to a convenience store for the first time in a month" or "I spoke up for the second time at the group meeting" have no column to be recorded in. With no column there is no budget, and with no budget that activity disappears from the next year's program plan.
The counterargument is not weak. The employment rate is easy to count, comparable, and convenient to present as grounds for spending tax money. The rebuttal asking what proves that a relationship has been restored is also fair. In programs using public funds, measurability is not a luxury but a minimum responsibility.
Even so, sticking to the employment rate as a single indicator is the more expensive choice. If more than half of the people go back, that program finds the same people again every year, does the initial counseling again, and starts over from the beginning again. A scorecard that does not count recovery keeps passing programs that cannot produce recovery.
Nor are there no tools for measuring the restoration of relationships. There are things that can be counted, such as the number of weekly face-to-face contacts, the length of continued participation in self-help groups, and whether contact is maintained 6 and 12 months after the program ends. This is not a call to erase the employment rate. It is a call to put one more column beside it.
When a young person who has received a certificate of completion asks whether he may come next week too, it is worth watching whether even one more program can have its counselor answer yes. A scorecard that asks whether someone is still connected to another person a year later, in place of whether they were employed at the moment the program ended. The moment that column appears, a budget attaches to the work of opening a door.
