LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass July 9 joined the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, Children’s Law Center of California and The RightWay Foundation to announce a partnership that will help connect young adults leaving foster care in Los Angeles with services including housing navigation, job readiness and job placement, financial education and more.
Homelessness disproportionately impacts Angelenos who have spent time in the child welfare system. When a foster youth turns 18 or 21, they are cut off from all support and left to fend for themselves. At least 30% of former foster youth become homeless or incarcerated within two years of leaving the system. To address homelessness generally, Los Angeles is working to confront the policies that lead to causes of homelessness within the child welfare system, the criminal justice system, the mental health and addiction treatment system, and more. This partnership builds on the announcement made by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority or LAHSA last month with the results of the 2024 Homeless Point-In-Time Count, which showed a decline in homelessness in the City of Los Angeles for the first time in six years and historic reductions in street homelessness.
The Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles is an independent 501(c)(3) which brings together business, philanthropy, the nonprofit sector and local government to address urgent needs of all Angelenos. Their primary homelessness prevention program, We Are LA, connects residents at risk of eviction with resources available to help them stay in their homes or otherwise stabilize their housing. Program caseworkers screen and connect residents to programs they already qualify for, like CalFresh, MediCal, child care assistance and earned tax credits. About 60% of the individuals and families the program has served report stable housing, with many others still working through the process.
The We Are LA Children and Youth program will extend this same model to youth exiting foster care, pairing each young person aging out of the system with a trained caseworker who has been in the foster care system themselves to connect them to available resources and to help secure housing for them. We Are LA is partnering with the Children’s Law Center and The RightWay Foundation to provide these new services.
The results of the 2024 Homeless Point-In-Time Count also saw a 17% increase in the number of people moved off the streets.