Youth Employment Sponsorship

Youth Economic Advancement (sponsored by Funding Partner, TBA)

East LA

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Today's youth ages 16-24 have a different way of thinking and approaching their future. Covid only accentuated the focus on the different set of values prevalent in this demographic. The standard progress of higher education after high school is not always possible or desired. There is a lot of re thinking and re-imagining of how business and spaces will be utilized in the future. There is a focus on entrepreneurship and the network of support necessary for these efforts to be successful. Secondly there is hesitancy or resistance in requiring a long term lease in order to implement their initiatives. Landlords are still reluctant to adjust to the new economic progress and do not offer shorter, more cost effective alternatives. Young business owners are not always ready to make a long term commitment to an untested idea and recent, rapid, rise in rental costs is a barrier.

As a community resource center, we also serve as a platform for the implementation of new ideas and initiatives. We have sponsored over 30 pop up markets over the last 18 months. Our next step is to rent a storefront that will serve as the collaborative space for young entrepreneurs to set up an actual shop. The monthly costs will be split among the vendors with our organization serving as the master tenant. The youth now will have the ability to set up their shop at a minimum cost, get exposure since the storefront will become a destination location, and there will be no long term commitment as a way to help mitigate their risks. The young vendors will be supported by the creation of jobs for youth that are not focused on being entrepreneurs. These jobs will be a way to learn valuable work skills for jobs that will be in demand in the near future as they address the issues that youth feel so strongly about. We are already a work training site working with LA County WDACS program Youth at Work. We have trained over 100 youth to date, with great results, both empirical and anecdotal. We currently also partner on a small collaborative boutique in El Sereno. We seek to expand on our model and be able to showcase the entrepreneurial spirit of the area.

Our initiative will be a successful part of a larger vision to re-invent the Whittier Boulevard corridor in East Los Angeles. LA County is looking to upgrade several buildings along the surrounding blocks and is actively pursuing implementing several key components. The space has already been identified and is a partnership with a community reinvestment organization (CORE) backed by funding from Genesis LA, and our organization. Our success will be the transition and buildup of the space. Our success will be the roll out of the vendors and the subsequent economic impact in our community with the creation of support jobs, the training and certification of youth as they go through our training program. Success will be the creation of a destination location to work with the County to revitalize the area. It will help usher in a fresh wave of doing business to an area that was heavily impacted by the Covid closures.

It is working in a progressive environment and although there will always be some universal business constants, some ideas we are implementing have not been done before. The re-creation of how business gets done post Covid is still a fluid environment. This is a natural progression of taking what works economically such as our vendors in an outdoors market, and allowing the ones that have a successful business model to expand on their model and take the next step to having a more permanent location. There is demand from the citizens in our communities to embrace and help guide the youth in a way that best prepares them for the future, the growth of our organization's work is a measure of our success. We already have several success stories of our youth that came to us for training, found our environment impactful enough to want to implement their own ideas. and have implemented their ideas and now run a small business on their own.