Shifting Power Through System Impacted Young Adult Grantmaking

Affordable housing and homelessness

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)

We seek to ensure that young people with lived experience of homelessness—particularly LGBTQ+ youth, youth of color, and systems-impacted youth—gain access to leadership and decision-making roles to find solutions to prevent and end youth homelessness.
Los Angeles County is home to one of the largest populations of homeless youth in the country. The 2024 Point-in-Time Count identified 2500 unhoused young people (18-26) in LA County. YYA are more likely to be female, Black, Latinx, and LGBTQIA+. 1 in 5 unhoused adults first experienced homelessness as a youth, so it’s critical that we find innovative solutions to youth homelessness.
Addressing this crisis requires a multifaceted approach that must include the leadership of young people to ensure successful program design and implementation. By providing a platform for transformation led by youth, the YYA Pooled Fund continues to work towards a system that works for youth, designed so that homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring.

The YYA Pooled Fund has successfully implemented 6 funding rounds, distributing over $4.6 million to nonprofits serving unhoused young people, in collaboration with the LA Emissary (LAE). Through this process, the YYA Pooled Fund has successfully trained young adults employed by the LAE to lead this work and understand grantmaking. From developing the priorities and eligibility, to drafting the Request for Proposals, scoring tool, and rubric, to conducting the interviews and awarding the grants, the young adults lead every step of the way.​​ After the grants are awarded, the young adults continue to take the lead in grant management and funder engagements, even writing proposals just like this one. If awarded, this funding will enable us to launch a new innovation funding round and amplify the voices of new young people with lived experience who can have the power to decide what innovation looks like in their communities. The LAE supports the leadership of young people with lived experience in all 8 service planning areas (SPAs) across LA County. With this funding, we will recruit one young person from each SPA team to learn how to engage in participatory grantmaking in the Pooled Fund. We will provide training around grantmaking and guide them through the process of identifying the priorities and eligibility, drafting the Request for Proposals, scoring tool, and rubric, conducting the interviews and awarding the grants.

Over the year of this grant we will train and support 8 young people with lived experience, and invest in their vision of innovation that will prevent and reduce youth homelessness. If our work is successful, the 8 young people will have access to income earning opportunities and develop a skill set that will allow them to further their housing stability and secure future living wage job opportunities. Los Angeles will be different because we will learn what innovation means to young people with lived experience, surfacing new ideas to address youth homelessness. We ultimately envision that Los Angeles will be a place where young adults have ownership over their futures and the future of their communities. As we continue to expand and develop, we expect to see more opportunities and care offered to unhoused young adults.