EXPOSED
This is a residual bucket — outreach workers, program coordinators, benefits navigators, reentry and housing specialists — and the modal worker splits time between in-person client contact and a heavy documentation load: intake forms, case notes, eligibility screening, grant reporting, referral logs. The paperwork half is squarely in AI's wheelhouse, and eligibility triage and resource matching are already being handled by chatbots and benefit-screening tools. What holds is the part that requires showing up: home visits, community meetings, walking a distrustful client through a system that has failed them, and de-escalating in real time.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Screening a client for SNAP/Medicaid eligibility, generating a referral list, and writing the case note are already being done by benefits-screening software, but sitting with someone in a shelter intake room who won't produce documents, or convincing a landlord to hold a unit for a reentry client, has no digital substitute — roughly half the workweek is exposed, which is what puts this at 11 rather than 6 or 15.
Some physical or field component. Home visits, ride-alongs to court dates and clinic appointments, street outreach to encampments, and staffing a table at a community health fair are recurring duties, but they're punctuated by long stretches at a desk in the CRM or HMIS — this is a job with a car and a caseload, not a job with tools and a jobsite, hence 11 and not 16.
No licence, no signature requirement. Most of these positions post as bachelor's-preferred with no licence at all; a CHW certification or a state peer-support credential may be listed, and neither creates personal legal exposure — the agency's clinical supervisor or the LCSW signs off on anything with consequence, which is why this sits at 4 and not 8.
The human relationship is the product. Clients in reentry, housing-first, and domestic-violence programs disclose to the specific person who showed up last time and didn't report them; continuity of that one relationship is what makes a no-show rate drop, and program outcomes are tracked against it — the 14 reflects that the relationship is the intervention, capped below 17 only because grant-funded turnover means agencies routinely reassign caseloads.
Meaningful discretion. You decide whether a family goes on the priority list, whether today's disclosure crosses into a mandated-reporter call, and whether to keep a client in a program after a relapse — real calls, but made inside eligibility rules, funder-defined service tiers, and a supervisor's sign-off, which is why this is 9 and not the 15 a clinical decision-maker would carry.
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