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

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

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. In a study of 21-year-old foster youth in California, Chapin Hall found that 52% experienced an arrest and 39% had been incarcerated.
While advocacy groups push reform of child welfare, there is no unfettered pipeline for young people who have experienced these systems to share their views.
Through Youth Voices Rising (YVR), we empower youth who experience foster care and the youth justice system to share their experiences, thoughts and concerns in ways that reach decision makers. We lift up the stories from these young people to policymakers, advocates and voters.
One YVR training 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. Their op-eds appeared in The Imprint and KnockLA. 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 50 op-eds and other written pieces, and worked with young people to host several webinars, drawing more than 1,000 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.
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 L.A. 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 normally 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, 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 L.A. can credibly say that they are unaware of the views of those with lived experience in the county’s foster care system.