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Changing the landscape of youth culture.
This youth center will serve as a safe haven for systems-impacted and foster youth in the city of Los Angeles to access free resources necessary for to become the leaders who shape culture. Our program centers around emotional intelligence, healthy conflict resolution and financial literacy offering youth alternatives to paths that they have seen lead to incarceration. This center will provide not resources for basic needs like academic and career support, but everything is done through the lens of emotional health creating a healthy culture.
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What is the primary issue area that your application will impact?
Support for foster and systems-impacted youth
In what stage of innovation is this project, program, or initiative?
Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)
What is your understanding of the issue that you are seeking to address?
Our youth currently face a rapidly changing landscape of culture combined with access to more information and autonomy than they have ever had. This has truly allowed the youth to create their own identity and culture primarily without adult interference. Youth have a powerful level of influence on our larger culture, many of whom have not had opportunities to develop soft skills like emotional intelligence and conflict resolution that would come with healthy adult guardian and mentor relationships. Without the exposure to the language and understanding of their inner world, many youth develop survival skills that stunt their emotional growth and inhibit the development of healthy conflict resolution skills. These youth grow up and become community members with stunted emotional development and unhealthy forms of conflict resolution and relationship building. This leads inevitably to involvement in the justice system and risks incarceration.
Describe the project, program, or initiative this grant will support to address the issue.
With access to our youth center, LA youth will have a safe space to go to when life feels overwhelming and out of hand. This grant will support the hiring of a multiple staff members including a licensed clinical social worker and/or LMFT. Our work encourages youth to address the painful experiences that go unnoticed and undressed at home and at school so our staff need adequate trauma informed care training. Our goal is to end justice involvement for our youth completely. We believe that with the right tools and skillset our youth can become agents of change in their communities. This means that when youth come to our center for for example tutoring, they will not only get the academic support that they need, but they will be meeting with a volunteer who will be trained and able to address the shame and frustration that comes with being behind academically as well as the pressure that many of our youth have of being a first generation graduate. This center will be a refuge where they will be able to receive supportive services like tutoring, employment readiness, college prep and more. The best part of our program is the mentorship that we offer throughout the youth's entire journey with our program.
Describe how Los Angeles County will be different if your work is successful.
If we are able to teach our youth emotional intelligence and healthy conflict resolution, they are able to take those skills into their homes and their schools. LA County will become a county with a culture of communal relationship building, shifting their focus from themselves to others. We will be a county where the youth will be known for taking action in their communities, for reducing crime rates, for encouraging others with a culture of emotional health and conflict resolution. They will be able to focus their energy on being agents of change in their communities rather than accepting the cycles of crime as the status quo.
What evidence do you have that this project, program, or initiative is or will be successful, and how will you define and measure success?
For years our organization, Dream Live Hope Foundation has offered life skills classes (emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and financial literacy) and wrap around services (employment, housing, vital documents etc,.) for men coming home from incarceration. We have seen the power of the human spirit to overcome fear, shame, pride and insecurity when given the proper language and safe environment to explore these things. On the contrary, we have seen how the lack of emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills becomes a very real barrier to rebuilding their lives with loved ones. Countless men and women that we have worked with have told us “if only I had known these skills when I was younger, I might not have ended up in prison.” We have had a 90% success rate with our adult program and have early indications that we will have similar numbers with our youth program. We measure success not as simply avoiding incarceration, but living a healthy and fulfilling life.
Approximately how many people will be impacted by this project, program, or initiative?
Direct Impact: 200.0
Indirect Impact: 1,000.0