Our results aren’t measured in a matrix somewhere. They’re people.

He came to us at eighteen, out of a home he needed to leave, still five months from graduating high school. He had changed schools five times. He had stuck with welding through all of it.

So we drove him to school and packed him a real lunch every day, and taught him to drive on the side. We tracked down the parent who had his documents and got them released, one at a time. He finished with good grades and a clean transcript.

The formal apprenticeship program took from May to July just to grant an interview, and then placed him in the wrong trade starting in October. He was couch surfing. October was too far away. So we started calling fabrication shops until one of them called back, and we asked for an interview — not a job, just an interview.

The owner said he liked him but he had no way to get there. We said we’d drive him, every day, for two weeks, until his first paycheck. Three weeks in, he’s doing well. He’s at sixteen dollars an hour with overtime, and he has just moved into transitional housing one mile from the shop, where he can bank almost everything he earns for a year.