Our Recommendation
The Other Side Academy is a high‑intensity, therapeutic‑community program that appears to deliver strong real‑world results on employment and life change for people with deep histories of crime, addiction, and homelessness. For funders who value deeply relational, long‑term behavior‑change models and are comfortable with evidence that leans on descriptive outcomes plus external therapeutic‑community research TOSA is a promising, mission‑aligned investment.
The Other Side Academy's Fierce Certification score is 100/100 based on our criteria:
✔ Has Ultimate Outcome Goals (50 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate Outcomes (10 pts)
✔ Measures Ultimate Outcomes (15 pts)
✔ Shows Continual Learning & Adaptation (25 pts)
☐ Measures Intermediate Counterfactual (10 pts)
☐ Measures Ultimate Counterfactual (10 pts)
The Social Problem
TOSA offers a 30‑month, peer‑run residential training school based on the therapeutic‑community model, where students live and work together while learning pro‑social, vocational, and life skills. Students operate social enterprises (like moving, storage, and thrift stores) and engage in intensive, peer‑driven feedback and accountability, practicing honesty, responsibility, and mutual self‑help every day. The model is offered free of charge as an alternative to incarceration or the streets, with the goal that graduates emerge able to live drug free, crime free, and employed “on the other side."
Key Outputs
Key outputs include:
- Residential capacity and duration: a two‑plus‑year, 24/7 residential program for men and women in Salt Lake City, with additional sites and a leadership institute helping other cities build similar academies or villages.
- Population served: individuals with long histories of substance abuse, criminal behavior, homelessness, and gang involvement, often entering via criminal‑justice referrals as an alternative to prison.
- Vocational enterprises: multiple work settings (e.g., thrift boutique and other businesses) where students learn job skills and support the program’s financial sustainability.
These outputs highlight strong operational intensity and a clear definition of what “success” looks like.
Key Intermediate Outcomes
Intermediate outcomes that TOSA emphasizes:
- Work readiness and employability: through vocational training and running program businesses, students develop job skills and work habits; the 100% employment at graduation figure reflects, in part, these intermediate gains.
- Behavioral norms and accountability: TOSA’s philosophy of “we save lives by changing behavior” and “200% accountability” points to systematic efforts to replace antisocial habits with honesty, responsibility, and mutual self‑help.
- Pro‑social community membership: the therapeutic community model itself is an intermediate outcome, creating sustained exposure to pro‑social peers and expectations.
Key Ultimate Outcomes
Ultimate outcomes where TOSA provides some data:
- Employment status: 100% of students employed at graduation and 84% of all graduates still employed is a strong, concrete outcome for a population with significant barriers to employment.
- Crime‑ and drug‑free living: TOSA defines its mission as keeping people drug free, crime free, and employed. Partners describe it as breaking cycles of incarceration, addiction, and violence. 75% of graduates remain drug-free. A low 23% of graduates are rearrested. 69% DCE overall and 80% DCE for those who stay 3+ years.
Continual Learning & Adaptation
TOSA shows key elements of a learning organization:
- Its model is explicitly built on decades of learning from Delancey Street and other therapeutic communities, and it has codified a clear philosophy (community as primary agent of change, mutual self‑help, and long‑term immersion).
- It has expanded into related efforts such as The Other Side Leadership Institute and The Other Side Village, suggesting that it is adapting the core model to new contexts and populations while preserving key elements.
- TOSA acknowledges the importance of evidence and publishes a white paper summarizing research on therapeutic communities.
Overall, TOSA appears to be strong on practice‑based learning and philosophical clarity, with room to grow on systematic measurement and transparent, counterfactual‑based evaluation aligned with our four‑step cycle.
Written by
