How We Count

What the public counter means

The counter shows validated events generated through LeaveOneLightOn.org. It does not show children served, placements made, foster homes licensed, adoptions completed, mentors matched, or national foster-care progress.

Event levels

1. Invitation opened: an approved official resource was opened.
2. Step started: an approved inquiry, orientation, signup, or form was begun.
3. Step confirmed: a visitor voluntarily reported a completed, identifiable action and the report passed review.

Privacy

The public aggregate contains event category, level, validation state, and timestamps only. Names, contact details, location, child-welfare information, free-text narratives, donation amounts, and session identifiers are never returned by the public totals endpoint.

Deduplication

Level 1 events use a short-lived, first-party session token and an event-specific deduplication window. Level 2 submissions are deduplicated by the approved form system. Level 3 reports require review. Raw identifiers should be hashed with a rotating salt and deleted according to the retention schedule.

Review and corrections

Administrators may reject spam, merge duplicates, withdraw invalid events, or approve self-reported confirmations. Every change is logged. Public totals update only from approved records. Corrections can reduce the displayed total.

National benchmark

The 57-of-100 figure is updated only when a new federal source is published and reviewed. It remains separate from the movement counter in storage, code, labels, and presentation.

Questions or corrections

Use the site’s Contact page and select “Progress methodology or correction.”