Imoyase Community Support Services

Projects

Ready to Rise
Ready to Rise (R2R) is a public-private partnership among the Los Angeles County Probation Department (LACPD), California Community Foundation (CCF), and Liberty Hill Foundation (LHF). R2R is designed to create robust positive youth development (PYD) resources across Los Angeles County (LAC). This PYD approach comprises culturally responsive, community-based prevention and intervention services provided by 49 community-based organizations (CBOs) across the five LAC supervisorial districts. R2R is an innovative initiative that relies on culturally and contextually grounded community-based approaches to address the prevention and early intervention needs of youth in LAC—particularly youth of color and marginalized youth (e.g., LGBTQ+, transition age youth, youth in child welfare and juvenile justice systems) who are at greater risk of systems involvement and incarceration.

Youth Organizing Capacity Building Initiative
The Youth Organizing Capacity Building Initiative (YOCBI) is a three-year initiative funded by the Weingart Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, and The California Endowment. YOCBI is designed to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of 501(c)(3) organizations engaged in youth organizing in communities most impacted by racial, economic, and social inequity across 6 Southern California regions (Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County). Twenty-six organizations across Southern California (16 based in Los Angeles County) have been awarded three-year unrestricted grants to increase their capacities to train young people in community organizing in support of youth development and social change. PARC designed a cross-site evaluation of YOCBI to explore how grant-making can expand the capacity of community-based organizations, deepen their connections and networks with each other to maximize the effectiveness of their equity efforts, and discern how philanthropy can best fund and support youth organizing organizations. Learn more >>

Partners for Children South Los Angeles
Partners for Children South Los Angeles (PCSLA) is a collaborative of 38 health and human services organizations that partner to provide service linkages and cross-agency care coordination for children ages birth to 5 and their families. Systems of care like PCSLA use strategic cross-agency service coordination to increase families’ service access, reduce service fragmentation, remove barriers impeding service utilization, and disrupt cycles of inequity among South LA families. Rather than working separately with individual service providers, PCSLA harnesses the expertise and resources from a cross-section of agencies that share a common agenda of improving access to quality healthcare, early education, and family support for South LA’s youngest and most vulnerable children. Services offered through PCSLA’s system of care cluster around six service domains relevant to the needs of South LA families: health, childcare, housing, child development, legal support, and wellbeing.

Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Voter Engagement
The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund was established in 2014 with the vision that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) must be integral to strengthening America’s democracy, improving the quality of life for all, and creating vibrant, multiracial communities. To this end, its mission is to foster a culture of civic participation within AAPI communities by supporting the growth of AAPI groups as organizational movements and power-building leaders that achieve specific policies, systems, and transformational change.

Color of Justice
The Color of Justice: The Landscape of Traumatic Justice—Youth of Color in Conflict with the Law is a report exploring how the field of psychology and the mental health system, including inadequacies and failures in prevention, early intervention, and treatment contribute to the problem of over-representation. The report provides: (1) personal stories from youth entangled in the juvenile justice system and their attempts to interact with, navigate, cope, and even heal from traumatic experiences with the system, (2) evidence that something is terribly wrong in this system that plods on, uninterrupted, (3) an analysis of issues related to context, race, and culture; (4) a critique of the psychology and the mental health system’s complicity with the JJ system’s approach with YOC, and (5) ideas about the way forward. Learn more >>

Black Child Suicide
In the United States, suicide is one of the leading causes of death for youth (Stone et al., 2017). However, in the past quarter century, while suicide rates have declined among White children, they have shown a steady increase among Black children. In a recent study of suicide rates
among Black adolescents, from 2001 to 2017, the rate of suicides for adolescent Black males increased by 60% and increased by 182% for adolescent Black females (Price & Khubchandani, 2019). This dis-proportionate increase in Black youth death by suicide constitutes a national public health crisis, but explanations remain speculative, research is limited, and interventions are culturally and contextually deficient.

COVID Needs Assessment
A set of findings and recommendations to help grassroots leaders, funders and policy makers better understand the nuances of how communities of color and other target audiences were impacted. View the five population reports and the executive summery below.