Know Before You Go (B4UGO) Campaign

Engage residents and stakeholders

Expand a pilot or a program

Adults getting sufficient social & emotional support

Participation in neighborhood councils

Government responsiveness to residents’ needs (Dream Metric)

Total number of local social media friends and connections (Dream Metric)

L.A. County is vast, with many diverse communities within its borders, including our country’s largest population of foster children. Once removed from their parents’ homes, many live with non-family members or in group homes; and they relocate and change schools more than six times. This transiency makes it difficult to learn vital life skills, garner work experience or make a plan for the future. They are isolated, and as they age out, this persists and sets them up for a life of instability.

In 2013, the Alliance for Children’s Rights and Children’s Law Center sought an engaging way to meaningfully educate and empower every transition-age youth, ages 16-24, or “TAY” in L.A. County. Together they created the Know Before You Go campaign (B4UGO), which features multimodal platforms to help TAY and organization’s serving them in the areas of work, school, life, health, money and more. This campaign was created for foster youth, informed by foster youth. That novel concept alone connects TAY, gives them a voice and a lifeline accessible in print or from their phone or computer.

Connection hallmarks of Know Before You Go platforms: (1) Print Toolkit: Foster youth are provided a packet of resources at court by their attorney building a connection with one of their key advocates; (2) B4UGO app: GPS-based mapping and notifications connect TAY with food banks, housing, clinics and more across L.A. County. LA2050 can make a 2.0 version of the app possible with filtered content, zip code searching and account login (based on TAY focus groups); (3) Knowb4ugo.org: The first website created for foster youth in L.A. County is a clearinghouse of information that is necessary to achieve success in life, school and work. LA2050 will connect more TAY to this new resource while increasing features. Soft launch in October 2015; (4) YouTube Channel: This first-of-its-kind web series is a talk show-style hip and entertaining series of videos starring foster youth talking about things like how to get a job, roommates, social media and more. There is nothing like it and it will give TAY a YouTube community, build connections with each other, and a new forum for conversation. The first season is in production and LA2050 can make season two a reality. See attached pilot video. (5) @knowb4ugola: A new Twitter account to bolster all communications for the campaign connecting more TAY to the tools on a platform they use daily.

To evaluate the success of expanding Know Before You Go Campaign, we will track these measures:

# hardcopies distributed

# app downloads

# hits on knowb4ugo.org

# YouTube views, subscribers, shares, comments

# Twitter followers @knowb4ugola or prevalence of the use of #knowb4ugo

We will compare the popularity of the different platforms, and we will request monthly feedback from the Young Leaders group that is part of a local collective impact project, the Opportunity Youth Collaborative, to test the usefulness and validity of content and delivery. This information will inform further development of the campaign.

Publicity/awareness (social capital)

Community outreach