More Participants Being Served in Each Service Category or More Services being Provided
The programs being offered have increased the number of services offered to Opportunity Youth since 2016. The number of participants receiving more than 5 services increased substantially. Below is a chart showing the shared services between 2016 and 2018 and the number of participants for each service during each period.
A list of all the services, including the additional services as of 2018’s data, has been included below.
| Services | Number of Participant Served | % of youth served |
| Adult Education | 1039 | 99.1% |
| Support Services | 1030 | 98.3% |
| Integrated Education and Training | 1018 | 97.1% |
| Entrepreneurial Skills Training | 1013 | 96.7% |
| Guidance and Counselling | 899 | 85.8% |
| Follow-up Services | 893 | 85.2% |
| Individual Service Strategy | 712 | 67.9% |
| Work Experience | 485 | 46.3% |
| Career Competency | 436 | 41.6% |
| Basic Skills | 396 | 37.8% |
| Job Development | 286 | 27.3% |
| Financial Literacy Training | 230 | 21.9% |
| Occupation Skills Training | 206 | 19.7% |
| Leadership Development | 191 | 18.2% |
| Tutoring | 129 | 12.3% |
| Mentoring | 60 | 5.7% |
The services with the least participants has raised many questions as they seem just as if not more important than the one’s with the highest number of participants.
Services that vast majority of people receive include Adult Education, Support Services, Integrated Education and Training, and Entrepreneurial Skills Training with over 95% of the participants participating in each. While the services with less that 20% of the youth participating are Occupation Skills Training, Leadership Development, Tutoring, and Mentoring. Tutoring had 12.3% and mentoring had 5.7% and were the lowest received services among participants.
Number of Services Received
In 2018, 84.9% participants being served received ten services or less, and over 99% of these participants received greater than five services. We also found that fifteen percent (15.1%) of participants received greater than ten services.
This means that participants were receiving a high amount of services, an average of 8.61 services per person.
We have several different hypotheses as to why this is happening.The three most feasible reasons are as listed below:
- As mentioned before the programs may have increased the number of services being offered to these youth which has resulted in more options and more services being received. They may also require a different suite of services.
- As participants remain engaged with the same program over time, they may end up collecting more types of services.
- However, the most likely reason is better data tracking. Programs have realized the importance of tracking this data and are now taking the initiative to more carefully track the services that were already being received. It is not possible to determine which of these explanations is true through our current analysis.