Elevating the Voices of L.A County Child Welfare and Justice Impacted Youth

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

In L.A. County, there are 22,339 children supervised by the DCFS. Almost 14,552 of them are in foster care, as of April 2024. Through Youth Voices Rising (YVR), we empower the youth who experience foster care and the youth justice system to share their experiences, thoughts and concerns in meaningful ways that reach decision makers. Through writer trainings and journalism fellowships, we lift up the stories from these young people to policymakers, advocates and voters -- those who can make a difference. We have a proven track record of working with young Angeleno writers. One of our YVR trainings engaged all L.A. County Youth Commission members, which was formed to provide youth oversight and influence in discussions around child welfare and youth justice in California’s largest metropolis. These trainings yielded six op-eds produced by commission members that appeared in The Imprint and Knock LA. Since launching YVR, we have trained hundreds of youth and published their stories.

Youth Voices Rising is a media training program for youth with lived experience in foster care, juvenile justice systems and/or homelessness. Last year, YVR helped former foster youth produce and publish 70 op-eds and other written pieces, and worked with young people to host several webinars, drawing more than 2,000 attendees.
A layout of our plan to accomplish these activities over the next year are as follows: Host workshops with local partners to train youth on op-ed writing and other communication skills, for which youth are paid for their participation and compensated again when their work is published. Hire Los Angeles-based Youth Voice Contributors to participate in a 3-month journalism training program. Support our current program manager Ivory Bennett who is a systems impacted youth herself, as she works to scale the program nationally. Develop, create and launch a monthly Youth Voices Rising podcast.
Edit and publish pieces about local policy challenges from current and former foster/justice-involved youth in Los Angeles County. Because LA County youth involved in these systems are almost 90% children and youth of color, we would expect our YVR participants to be representative of this population.

Fostering Media Connections’ existence is pinned to the belief that a quality media environment is essential for all voices and ideas to be considered. Our ultimate goal is to develop a greater awareness and deeper understanding for youth justice and child welfare issues in Los Angeles and beyond. We do this through publishing daily news stories, resources for foster families and elevating youth voice throughout our publications. If we are successful in the plan we propose here, many more of the county’s current and former foster youth will have developed the writing and communications skills essential to ensuring that their voice is heard by the public. The work of these young writers and thinkers will have been featured in The Imprint and Fostering Families Today, along with other partnering media outlets. We will have ensured that no policymaker in Los Angeles can credibly say that they are unaware of the views of those with lived experience in the county’s foster care system.

Youth Voices Rising’s impact is defined in a number of ways:
The number of youth given skill-building opportunities through our workshops, internships, contributor-role participation, webinar speaking and other programming. (70 in 2023)
Re-engagement of youth in our program through continued opportunities. Commitment to being open to feedback from participants through surveys.
The number of articles published by systems-impacted youth annually (more than 70 in 2023). What is not measurable are the connections and relationships built by our YVR team to the youth they work with: attending college graduations, celebrating job attainment, and providing parenting advice as well as empathizing in the deeply heartbreaking moments of family separation, deaths and dealing with the residual emotional impacts of growing up in these systems.