Admission criteria

In many kinds of programs, you need clear guidelines about who you will accept and who you won’t. The secret is to help only those who are helpable, and to spend much less time on those who refuse to be helped. If you have clear pre-defined guidelines, you can reject applicants who fall short.

For example:

• If you run a residential program for addiction recovery, you should accept only applicants who really want to recover and who agree to follow the house rules. You should reject those who are looking only for low-cost accommodation.
• If you run a micro-credit program for small business, you should assess whether applicants are in need and will repay their loans. You have to reject high-risks applicants who will not repay.
• If you run an incubator for small business, you should check that applicants already have skills in the kind of business they want to start credit. If someone wants to start a tailor shop, they should already be a proficient tailor, able or ready to work without supervision.
• If you are fostering children of poor families to go to school, you need to assess their need so that you help only those in need.
• In one program for at-risk youth, the director carefully assessed applicants to find out who was willing to learn, change, and follow program rules.
• If you are starting schools in cultures with predjudice against girl children, you might require that each family register all children as students, not just their boys.
• If a whole community is short of water, you will require that the village leadership approve the project and agree to make water available to the whole community.

In some kinds of programs, you might want to use discretion and take a risk sometimes. In addiction recovery, relapse is quite common and all applicants pose a risk. Taking a risk can pay off; the high-risk applicants sometimes do better than low-risk applicants.