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.
Elevating Youth Voices & Shared Power
The YMN grounded in youth voice and led in partnership with the Youth Mentoring Nexus Visionaries – a cohort of young people with lived experience navigating systems. The Visionaries convene monthly and serve as subject-matter experts on what makes mentorship meaningful, trustworthy, and effective, drawing from their firsthand experiences across child welfare, education, workforce, housing, and juvenile legal systems.
Strengthening Referral Pathways & Increasing Connection
The Nexus Program Finder Tool is a centralized, easy-to-use database designed to help youth, caregivers, social workers, and practitioners find relationship-centered youth programs based on their unique needs. Apply to be added.
Working with systems partners, such DCFS and DYD, to test and improve referral pathways to help connect more youth to supportive adults via relationship-oriented Community-Based Organizations.
Building Capacity & Supporting Youth-Serving CBOs
Capacity Building trainings on topics such as mentorship best practices, healing-centered approaches, and positive adult-youth relationships. Visit the Training Archive and Sign Up for the OYC Newsletter to hear about upcoming training.
Promoting mentoring and relationship building opportunities for youth across the Nexus and the broader OYC network (please email opportunities to Shelly Demarre at shelly@laoyc.org).
Enhancing Collaboration & Cross-Sector Coordination
Quarterly Community of Practice (CoP) virtual convenings for youth-serving organizations to connect, share resources, and learn from one another. Each quarter focuses on a topic, along with space for open dialogue. For more information on how to join the CoP email Shelly Demarre at shelly@laoyc.org.
H32k Supportive Relationships Workgroup convenes to help move the Nexus work forward through cross-sector collaboration and action-oriented meetings.
Over the past year, the Youth Mentoring Nexus Visionaries developed a set of youth-informed recommendations to strengthen positive adult relationships and support systems in Los Angeles. Through facilitated discussions, collaborative design sessions, and ongoing feedback, the Visionaries identified gaps in traditional mentoring approaches and articulated the relational conditions young people need to feel supported, respected, and empowered. These recommendations provide actionable guidance grounded in lived experience and continue to inform more responsive, youth-centered mentoring practices across the network.
During the design process, the Visionaries reflected on their experiences with mentorship and supportive adults, consistently returning to one core idea: what mattered most wasn’t the title or the traditional concept of a “mentor,” but whether someone in their lives genuinely showed up for them. From this, the Visionaries established the concept of Someone Who Cares (SWC) – a language and mindset shift from traditional mentorship as a narrow program or service to a broader understanding of relationships as essential infrastructure for healing, thriving, and feeling connected.
This year, the Youth Mentoring Nexus convened a quarterly Community of Practice and delivered capacity-building training that engaged 40+ mentoring organizations. We also engaged over 25 youth-serving organizations across the county in one-on-one meetings to assess the greatest challenges organizations are currently facing and what primary needs and solutions can best mitigate those challenges. These learnings were shared with partners and funders and will continue to be leveraged for action in the new H32k workgroup.
Building on previous work, YMN partnered with two teams at DCFS to co-design referral pathways alongside the Visionaries – testing, learning from, and iterating on the approach – while also helping connect more youth to potential mentors through community-based organizations. Our work with Level Up resulted in 25+ referrals and yielded several key learnings, including: how to reduce friction and increase efficiency in the referral process; that an especially high-touch strategy is a non-negotiable to effectively ensure connection and persistence; and the need to match based on multiple criteria youth identify as critical to authentic connection – among other important takeaways.
The Youth Mentoring Nexus significantly enhanced its Program Finder Tool in 2026, adding 22 mentoring programs (for a total of 34) and strengthening program profiles with more detailed information and improved search filters based on one-on-one platform testing with eight youth. These enhancements increased accessibility and usability for youth-serving professionals and directly supported successful 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.
