Summary
What do they do? New Door provides paid employment and support, high-school-equivalency education, and career services. The actual portfolio includes San Jose as well as SF and Oakland. Its Vision 2030 strategy is strengthening career-linked pathways; a staffing plan is not evidence of achieved health or a new donor-funded place. More
Why this approach interests us
- Paid work and integrated support can help transition-age young people build stability and access opportunities.
Our main reservations
- No local causal QALY effect is established. The small utility gain, marginal spending mix, complete costs and funding additionality are analyst judgments.
What do you get for your dollar?
Across the Bay Area, including SF, the estimate is $229 million. This costs an entire unrestricted gift, not one SF employment place. Only a modest short-term employment-related health effect is quantified; education, earnings and opportunity may have substantial value outside this health model. Inspect the whole-gift model.
- sf estimate
- $508M / 10 QALYs — Central whole-gift donor estimate; 45% SF residence share is judgmental.
- bay estimate
- $229M / 10 QALYs — Includes SF and modeled Oakland/San Jose/other Bay beneficiaries; do not add SF again.
- gift coverage
- 100% cash counted — Central 70% integrated employment, 30% other provision with unquantified health.
- evidence
- Weak health transfer — External adult employment trials do not establish a youth-program QALY effect.
1. What do they do?
New Door provides paid employment and support, high-school-equivalency education, and career services. The actual portfolio includes San Jose as well as SF and Oakland. Its Vision 2030 strategy is strengthening career-linked pathways; a staffing plan is not evidence of achieved health or a new donor-funded place.
Support an integrated employment offer
Paid work, casework, training, supervision, transport and necessary education/transition help are budgeted together.
Fund additional education and career services
Separate budget shares cover provision beyond the integrated employment core, not the same support charged twice.
Measure health separately from economic progress
Credentials, wages and placements are not converted automatically into health utility or lifetime survival.
Scope of this review. Central allocation: 70% integrated employment, 15% additional education, 10% additional career services and 5% strategy/reserve/other. These are prospective analyst priors, not audited allocations. All gift cash stays in the numerator; other benefits are unquantified, not assumed absent.
2. Monitoring and information sharing
UK adults selected for health-led IPS trials
Government employment-trial evaluation. Small and heterogeneous health-utility findings provide context, not a direct youth effect.
Our assessment. The model’s .005 utility is judgment, not a validated transfer or accumulated trial QALYs.
UK employment-support participants
Group Work/JOBS II trial economic evaluation. No mean EQ-5D improvement was reported.
Our assessment. Important counterevidence against assuming employment support creates health; not proof all youth programs are ineffective.
New Door youth and career-service users
Current primary program descriptions. Paid employment, education support and career pathways are real; programs need not serve disjoint participants.
Our assessment. Service existence, jobs and confidence are not causal health outcomes.
New Door’s SF, Oakland, San Jose and additional programs
2025 audited statements. Finances document a broader organization than the prior single-SF-place model.
Our assessment. Historical regional expenditures do not identify prospective prices, resident mix or gift additionality.
3. Qualitative assessment
Paid work and integrated support can help transition-age young people build stability and access opportunities.
Key reservations
- The central and favorable results do not support a sub-$100,000 per 10 QALY claim.
- The health-only model omits potentially important educational, economic and community value.
- Local utility, duration, marginal allocation and donor additionality are unmeasured judgments.
- San Jose is within the actual portfolio; an SF-only employment place is not the whole organization.
- Program duration, all-funder costs and current extra capacity remain uncertain.
- The official-linked current appeal includes pharmacy-technician training and illustrative wage/transport amounts. These are fundraising examples, not measured QALY effects or complete marginal course prices; their wider earnings and opportunity benefits remain unquantified.
Benefits not included in our estimate
- Unquantified education, credentials, career progression, wages and longer-run opportunity benefits.
- Lifetime mortality or health gains inferred from employment or promotional statistics.
- Duplicated support, housing or partner-clinic health effects within the same integrated cohort.
- Unpriced employer production, financial transfers or opportunity costs treated as QALYs.
4. What do you get for your dollar?
A $100,000 gift yields an estimated .001969 SF QALYs, or .004375 across the Bay.
The central $20,000 complete offered-place allowance funds 3.5 expected six-month employment offers from the $70,000 employment allocation. Fractional offers are expectation accounting, not purchasable slots. The utility average already includes unsuccessful engagement; no second completion or job-placement multiplier is applied.
A better life is our comparison unit of 10 additional quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), potentially spread across people. These are uncertain estimates, not measured returns or verified donation offers.
How we calculate the estimate
Central SF model: ($70,000 / $20,000) × .005 utility × .5 integrated years × .5 funding additionality × .45 SF share
.00196875 SF QALYs; $100,000 × 10 / .00196875 = $507,936,508
Model inputs and assumptions
- Integrated employment allocation
- 70% of gift (range: 50–80%; separate all-employment stress). Historical employment spending informs scope but does not establish the next gift’s allocation. Other provision remains costed. Judgment.
- Complete offered-place cost
- $20,000 (range: $12,000–$30,000). Includes wages, casework, training, supervision, transport and allocated shared costs once. Not a quote or mismatched annual-cost/participant ratio. Judgment.
- Average net health utility gain
- .005 (range: .001–.02; null and negative stresses). Not an imported adult trial coefficient. Average across offered places includes noncompletion; certificates and wages receive no separate health credit. Judgment.
- Integrated health exposure
- .5 years (range: .25–.75 years). All health is within the first year of the offer; exposure integrates onset and decay. No lifetime employment-health tail. Judgment.
- Access caused by the gift
- 50% (range: 0–75%). Services preserved or expanded beyond public/private commitments and accessible alternatives. A deficit alone does not establish this share. Judgment.
- SF residence share
- 45% (range: 25–60%). All modeled recipients are provisionally Bay residents, including San Jose. Accounting location is not beneficiary residence; any non-Bay share needs separate allocation. Judgment.
How much could the estimate change?
- Joint favorable: $22.22M / 10 SF QALYs. $13.33M per 10 Bay QALYs. Still far above the target; not a confidence limit.
- Pessimistic positive: $38.4B / 10 SF QALYs. $9.6B per 10 Bay QALYs.
- All-employment allocation: $355.56M SF / $160M Bay. Other central assumptions unchanged. A diagnostic restricted-core comparison, not the central unrestricted portfolio.
- Additional-resource stress: Positive ratios double. An illustrative extra $100,000 gives central $1.016B SF and $457.14M Bay. This is not a measured societal-resource estimate.
- Null and harm: No positive ratio. No funding additionality or no health gain gives zero. Shared negative utility scales with additionality; independent gift harm can persist even when provision is replaced.
Uncertainty. This is a partial-health portfolio judgment, not measured whole-organization effectiveness or a calibrated probability-weighted mean. The single employment health increment already covers its integrated support; do not add education, career, housing or partner-treatment benefits without distinct causal outcomes and overlap checks. The site’s six-month employment headline and three-month-plus FAQ differ, so the modeled six-month dose needs confirmation.
5. Funding and previous grants
Neither central nor favorable assumptions approach $100,000 per 10 QALYs. Verify actual health change and unrestricted-gift use before making a health-based recommendation.
Calendar-2025 audited expenses were $6.505M, including $5.079M program expense, and government grants were $1.439M. The operating net-asset decline differs from the total net-asset decline; neither proves a marginal offer. Do not divide calendar-2025 costs by fiscal-2024–25 DCYF outputs. Complete course allowances include overhead and unsuccessful offers. Wages are donor costs but partly transfers in societal accounting; participant labor/time, volunteer inputs and employer output need explicit valuation before subtracting transfers. No full-resource cost or current unfunded slot is verified.
This review does not establish a verified marginal funding offer or a complete history of grants.
Opens the organization’s giving page. A general donation may not fund the specific activity modeled here; confirm allocation with the recipient.
6. Sources
- 2025 audited financial statements. New Door Ventures / SD Mayer & Associates. Primary audited finances. Published: June 12, 2026; calendar 2025; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- What We Do. New Door Ventures. Primary portfolio description. Published: Current page; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Employment Program. New Door Ventures. Primary service and duration description. Published: Current page; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Education Program. New Door Ventures. Primary service description. Published: Current page; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Career Services. New Door Ventures. Primary service description. Published: Current page; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- SF Employment Program Director posting. New Door Ventures. Primary strategy/implementation context. Published: Current posting; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Estimates of IPS impact over 12 months. UK Department for Work and Pensions. Primary trial evaluation. Published: 2023; updated April 8, 2024; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Group Work/JOBS II cost-benefit technical report. UK Department for Work and Pensions. Primary economic evaluation. Published: 2021; updated May 17, 2022; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Financial disclosures and donation route. New Door Ventures. Primary organization/giving context. Published: Current page; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- 45 Years, One Door at a Time — official-linked giving campaign. New Door Ventures. Organization fundraising disclosure. Published: Undated; accessed September 8, 2026; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
Annual expenses: years and sources
Average annual expenses (three consecutive fiscal years): $5,922,523. Organization size is separate from the modeled cost-effectiveness of a donation.
New Door Ventures
Whole legal entity Form 990 Part IX total functional expenses; latest original reconstructed filings checked, fiscal-end year from printed reporting dates. Older fallback rows from IRS extracted API.
Latest original filings checked; ProPublica extracted API lags these original returns.