Bread Head Youth Ambassadors: Building a Resilient Community

Westside

City of Los Angeles

Safe Place for Youth (SPY)

UCLA Center for Community Learning (UCLA CCL)

Venice Community Housing (VCH)

Department of Mental Health (DMH)

In March 2019, we formed our Youth Advisory Board with the intention to gauge needs for PAN, our program to teach recently housed youth to cook on a CalFresh budget. We left with an understanding of other serious issues: 1) Limitations of services for individuals experiencing houselessness. 2) Increased social isolation experienced when transitioning into housing, from both their community on the streets and the general population they are expected to assimilate to.

This inspired adding two new programs: CHEW, which provides access to life skills around food literacy, health and wellness, and the Community Ambassador Program, where youth leaders are hired to engage the community to inform and access our programs. Building community resources and goals of balanced living is critical, no matter where a person is in the housing process. Conducting outreach at city-wide agencies, Ambassadors communicate barriers that perpetuate cycles of vulnerability and collaborate to find solutions.

In April 2019 we met to interview our first Ambassador, a struggling young artist facing chronic housing insecurity. For years they faced challenges related to mental health, gender identity, and job security. Though they had participated in several programs within LA to address these challenges, they still felt unsupported in achieving balanced living.

Now, almost a year later, they have achieved stability and are thriving for the first time in years. Through their unique lens of lived experience, they help us shape our programs to be more inclusive, effective, and trauma informed. Bread Head empowers individuals with the tools and support systems needed to create change in their own lives, and inspires them to civically engage with the entire community. Through creating a model of outreach and advocacy that reflects the diversity of our community we build resiliency. Our current Ambassador is a valued staff member and their voice is incorporated in this grant narrative.

Direct Impact: 500

Indirect Impact: 2,000

Through Community Ambassador outreach efforts, we discovered patterns at shelters that caused people to return to the streets: mandatory in person case management meetings that caused youth to choose between their shelter bed or employment, and LGBTQ+ discrimination. Communicating these concerns to our partners at DMH, it was discovered that shelter contracts lacked mandatory trainings for staff on trauma informed care. Ambassador collaboration creates broader impact by informing system policies on quality of services delivered.

Expansion of this program increases opportunities to discover barriers experienced at systems that touch the lives of our community, and empowers people with lived experience to collaborate and find solutions.

Success is measured on key indicators of balanced lifestyle and community resiliency: increasing engagement, retention, food security, life skills developed, sense of self-efficacy and social connection, and placement into continuing education or jobs.

Some of the greatest challenges engaging the community are cultural relevance and consistency. Our Ambassadors facilitate monthly Advisory Boards and outreach efforts to receive community feedback ensuring our programs remain relevant incentives that create solutions around barriers. Through peer lead outreach, our community feels a sense of belonging and accountability to keep referring others and showing up. We keep track of member attendance and impact of programming with validated assessments on longitudinal building of skills, steps towards achieving goals, and strength of social support.

The Ambassador positions are contracted for one year, and their success in completing the program is measured by readiness and placement into workforce or secondary education. There are many services for employment that typically refer clients to customer service or manual labor. While these are vital positions in the workforce, they don’t always inspire members to reach their full potential. Participation in the program bridges this gap by creating case plans for the year that support action to create and achieve goals. The last three months of the program support participants while they apply for next steps that inspire and motivate them.

Food insecurity

Resilient communities

Homelessness

Access to the LA2050 community

Host public events or gatherings

Communications support

Office space for meetings, events, or for staff

Capacity, including staff

Strategy assistance and implementation

Tech Support