Empowering Systems-Impacted Youth

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

South LA County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit) City of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a citywide benefit)

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

Over-incarceration and prison recidivism have upended LA communities, scarred our families, and destroyed the lives of local youth. Between 1983 and 2015, the California state prison population increased by 225%. By 2015, LA County had more juvenile facilities than community colleges. Exceptionally high rates of familial and parental incarceration have contributed to LA County having the largest population of foster youth in the nation. One in three LA County youth who receive parole or probation are rearrested within one year, contributing to long-term disconnection from school systems.
For at least 40 years, our founding team has sought to bring awareness to the often-overlooked humanity and trauma of incarceration. There is pain that is felt by incarcerated individuals and families; there is economic and social destabilization; there is a vacuum of absence and disruption felt in LA County- the largest prison system in the world. We are the generation to end this devastating cycle.

Life Changers is our highly successful 12-week peer mentor program that directly addresses the specific issues young people face after justice-system involvement, including years of incarceration. The Life Changers program mission is to connect with systems-impacted people and provide a safety net of healing that non-peer anti-recidivism professionals can often overlook or ignore. Our evidence-based, trauma-informed curriculum is specifically designed to address the complex social-emotional, mental health, and identity needs of systems-involved youth in LA and radically redirect these young people toward an empowered, healthy, and positive relationship with our community. To date, the Life Changers program has graduated 12 classes with over 180 total systems-involved people in LA.
Classes are facilitated by professionally trained adult mentors who have previously been incarcerated in LA. Our program provides intensive, structured workshops to promote self-awareness, mental health education, and social-emotional healing. In addition to standard participation and numerous graduate activities, we have also recently launched a youth leader mentor-in-training educational track to all youth who strive to become mentors themselves. There are currently 20 new youth participants enrolled this quarter, 8 who will be enrolled in the leadership training track. We aim to uplift and train these developing peer mentors to become LA’s future leaders, change-makers, and community organizers.

This program will annually graduate at least 80 justice-impacted LA youth ages 18-24. We anticipate at least 20 of these youth participants will enroll in our youth leader mentor-in-training track. All are actively invited to participate in our ongoing organizational opportunities for community service, restorative justice, and peer support. Our developing leaders also have the opportunity to assume interning and junior leadership roles across our organization’s programs, which provide healing services to at least 4,000 currently incarcerated and justice-impacted people per year.
Through our initiatives, we imagine a future world with a much smaller engine of justice, and greater access to mental health resources, widespread community-building systems, and mentorship training opportunities. We believe that this will yield lower rates of recidivism and incarceration, which will yield more intact families, less educational and economic disruption, and reduced poverty in our communities.