Campaign launched by the OYC in 2023
Convened by the Alliance for Children’s Rights
The Youth Mentoring Nexus (YMN) is a countywide initiative designed to strengthen how young people build and sustain meaningful relationships with supportive adults, while advancing systemic improvements to better serve Opportunity Youth in Los Angeles. The YMN brings together public agencies, community-based organizations, and youth leaders to align, coordinate, and elevate cross-system efforts to ensure every young person has access to consistent, caring adult support.
Grounded in lived experience, the YMN Visionaries developed youth-informed recommendations to form stronger, more meaningful relationships with supportive adults. Their recommendations identify what young people need to feel supported, respected, and empowered; and offer suggestions for building more responsive, youth-centered practices across the network.
The Visionaries identified a core concept: what matters most isn’t the title of “mentor,” but having someone who genuinely shows up and cares. Someone Who Cares (SWC) reframes mentorship to a broader understanding of the relationships young people need to feel connected, supported, and able to thrive.
YMN engaged 40+ mentoring organizations through Community of Practice convenings and capacity-building trainings, while meeting one-on-one with 25+ youth-serving organizations to identify key challenges, needs, and solutions. These learnings are helping inform partners, funders, and future H32K work.
YMN partnered with DCFS and the Visionaries to co-design and test stronger referral pathways, resulting in 25+ youth referrals through Level Up. Key learnings reinforced the importance of high-touch support, streamlined referrals, and youth-informed matching to create meaningful, lasting connections.
YMN expanded the Program Finder Tool to 34 mentoring programs and improved search features based on direct testing with youth. These enhancements made it easier to find relevant programs and used in supporting youth referrals through the DCFS Pathways partnership with Level Up.
Campaign launched by the OYC in 2013
Convened by the Alliance for Children’s Rights and UNITE-LA
Foster Youth at Work engages public workforce and child welfare agencies in LA County in devising collaborative, systemic solutions to improve foster youth connection to work readiness training, early work experiences, and pathways to sustainable careers.
“When this campaign was first launched, only 80 foster youth were enrolling in the County’s youth jobs programs each year. This year, 866 foster youth participated in a paid work experience thanks to the collaborative leadership of LA County’s child welfare and workforce systems.”
— David Rattray
President & CEO, UNITE-LA
866 youth in foster care were placed in paid work experience, an increase of over 15% from the previous year.
