Los Angeles Service Academy

LASA provides a year-long intensive introduction to the infrastructure and institutions of greater LA for high school juniors who have expressed an interest in public, civic, and civil service. LASA students live across the county, and include systems-impacted youth. Funding supports student trainings - from transportation to books and food; speaker and teacher/staff support; and the development of new modules to add to existing series on water, housing and food insecurity, justice, youth mental health and public health, and more.

LASA provides an intensive introduction to the infrastructure and institutions of greater LA for high-school juniors who have expressed an interest in public, civic, and civil service. LASA seeks support to continue our proven work with students from across the county, including systems-impacted youth. Funding supports student trainings, additional partnerships, and new modules on the county-wide opportunities and infrastructural work involved in the 2028 Olympics, continuing responses to COVID-19, and housing and food access challenges.

LASA has a proven history and seeks support to continue this work to expand its foundational skills training of student activists; create additional partnerships - specifically with foster care students and new schools; ease transportation concerns; and introduce new modules on the decolonization of LA's water history, environmental impact, and the county-wide opportunities and infrastructural work involved in the 2028 Olympics.

How do LA’s youth experience LA and how do they imagine LA’s future? LASA invites them to consider how they are problem-solvers and visionaries of both the LA of today and of tomorrow.

LASA empowers a diverse group of LA's youth to not only understand the complexities of civic infrastructure, but be the problem-solvers and visionaries of our city’s immediate and far-flung future.

We seek philanthropic support to fund LASA's ongoing operations and next cohort of student participants in the 2016-2017 programmatic year. Specifically, LASA brings together high school juniors from all over Los Angeles County for an intensive week in the summer, plus one Saturday per month during the school year. Each meeting combines experts with field trips tied to themes critical to civic life in LA: transit, governance, water, the LA River, the harbor, law enforcement, food/housing, etc.

LASA teaches high school students how things work in Southern California.