Empowering Children and Families through Professional Mentoring

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

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

Friends LA’s innovative approach specifically focuses on children of young parents who experienced foster care in their childhood, putting their children at higher risk for continued Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement than any other population in the state of California. Throughout California, 10% of all children will be reported to CPS by age 3. For children whose parents experienced foster care, that number jumps to 53%. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, about 36% of youth experiencing chronic homelessness in LA County said they were involved in foster care at some point in their lives. Friends LA helps youth break free of child welfare system involvement by constructing a supportive network around their families, helping them to build knowledge and skills, connecting them to concrete resources, and providing both them and their caregivers with professional mentoring services.

Friends LA stabilizes LA County families facing the greatest challenges and provides crisis-prevention services to disrupt child entry into foster care. To maximize youth outcomes, we utilize a two-generation (2Gen) approach in which both children and their caregivers are served deliberately and simultaneously. Professional Mentors (called “Friends”) support the educational progress and healthy prosocialdevelopment of youth, while simultaneously supporting their caregivers to ensure they have access to the tools, economic resources, and social bonds needed to provide nurturing environments in which their children can thrive. In FY24, Friends LA will serve 248 racially diverse youth living in LA County ages 4-12 – explicitly focusing on Metro and South LA, as well as the Antelope Valley of northern LA County. With your support, we will grow from serving 192 youth in FY23 to 248 in FY24, meeting the urgent need for our 2Gen approach among LA County children and families. As our holistic model provides support for the entire family, your investment will positively impact approximately 1165 youth, caregivers, and siblings. This work will improve both caregiver and child social and economic resilience, producing a legacy of family well-being that passes from one generation to the next.

Friends of the Children-Los Angeles works to stabilize LA County families facing the greatest challenges, providing crisis-prevention services through 1:1 long-term professional mentoring. With support from the Department of Mental Health, expansion is underway to reach children and families in all 8 Service Planning Areas (SPAs) across Los Angeles County. Friends LAs headquarters are located in the Metro South geographic area that serves families in SPAs 4 and 6 and has offices in the Antelope Valley (SPA 1), Long Beach (SPA 8), and Pasadena (SPA 3). Funding from DMH is supporting a multi-year expansion to all the remaining SPAs, which will grow enrollment to 312 youth and their families by the Fall of 2025.

Friends LA is dedicated to continuous, rigorous evaluation. Friends record every interaction with or concerning a family in our Efforts to Outcomes (ETO) database management system. Each FOTC-LA site tracks data in ETO, which ensures efficiency, accountability, and ongoing model fidelity. Data is reported back in a program performance scorecard platform on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis so that Friends can adjust their work in alignment with youth progress in real time. The scorecard is a network-wide collaboration to monitor “in real time” how our program services impact the progress of program youth and helps us understand our internal strengths and opportunities. Additionally, our program participants engage in both service planning and decision-making, resulting in highly individualized services and the assurance that organizational activities are in line with our mission and objectives.