The juxtaposition at Chuco’s Justice Center is startling: Most of the one-story building in South Central Los Angeles looks like a small school, housing several classrooms, a library, a recording studio, a community garden and offices where staff offer counseling, legal services, and support for mental health and addiction to youth involved with the justice system. But throughout the building, signs of the center’s previous incarnation remain: cramped, dirty cells where children and youth were once held, a judge’s bench that sits in what is now a community room, a solitary confinement cell in the former processing room.
The building that Chuco’s Justice Center now calls home was once the David V. Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center, a juvenile courthouse where youth waited to be sentenced. The detention center closed in 2013, and in 2019, the Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) established its headquarters there, renaming the building and transforming the space from one of punishment to one of opportunity.
This evolution highlights the progress Los Angeles has made in both reducing youth incarceration and developing alternative programs for youth opportunity. Change hasn’t been easy, though; it’s come after years of effort from advocates, organizers, nonprofit organizations — such as YJC — and with the support of philanthropic funders.
One crucial supporter has been Ready to Rise, a public-private partnership between the Liberty Hill Foundation, California Community Foundation (CCF) and the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Ready to Rise was developed to help small, local nonprofits that work on at-risk and justice-impacted youth development in Los Angeles access resources from the public sector.
“Some of these organizations are typically locked out of public funding because they don’t have professional grant writers or they don’t have all the capacity to go through the arduous process of obtaining local, state or federal funds,” said Lisa Small, who serves senior director of youth and transformative justice at the Liberty Hill Foundation, and has led Ready to Rise since its inception.
Ready to Rise began as a $3.2 million pilot program in 2019. It was originally developed as a small test case that would support 20 organizations at most. Over the years, the program has grown into something much more established and long term. It is now realigning around $50 million in funding and supporting 100 organizations throughout Los Angeles. Earlier this year, Los Angeles County renewed its contract with Ready to Rise, which will allow the program to continue for an additional seven years. Liberty Hill estimates that the program may reach $200 million awarded to community-based youth development organizations by the end of the seven-year period.
Liberty Hill and CCF aren’t the initiative’s only philanthropic backers. In addition to ongoing support from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, the Ballmer Group and the Dwight Stuart Foundation, Ready to Rise has received commitments from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation and the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation.
Dynamics around philanthropy’s support for Ready to Rise
According to Small, one of the biggest takeaways from Ready to Rise has been how important collaboration is within the field of philanthropy – and the work that it takes to collaborate. As the program has evolved, Liberty Hill and CFF have also undergone changes. What hasn’t changed is the foundations’ commitment to supporting youth.
Ready to Rise has also learned how to be more responsive. Politically, the world has changed since the program began, and nonprofit organizations have had to respond to emergent crises in the city and county, including the pandemic, wildfires and ICE raids.
“Because the program was always designed to meet organizations where they’re at… we’ve been able to be, in my opinion, a stabilizer for a lot of organizations moving through these different moments in their lives,” Small said.
Small also noted that the collaborative aspect of Ready to Rise has allowed funders that focus on different issue areas — from job opportunities and education to justice reform and the arts — to be part of a larger ecosystem that supports young people.
Small pointed out how that intersectionality applies to the work: “I think we as philanthropy can meet young people at the intersection of their identities and complexities; that’s when our dollars go further and furthest.”
For the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, which has been supporting Ready to Rise since the program’s launch and has awarded multi-year grants totaling $600,000, Ready to Rise is a natural fit for its work.
“With our emphasis primarily on children and families and transition-age youth, this program really made a lot of sense for us, given the spectrum of initiatives that we’re engaged in. It touches a lot of the populations we care about,” said Jennifer Price-Letscher, CEO of the Parsons Foundation.
Price-Letscher added that one of the important things about Ready to Rise, as well as other organizations and programs Parsons supports, is that they also think about the prevention side. Ready to Rise not only prevents young people from becoming involved with the justice system; it also supports programs that will help all youth prosper.
“It’s one thing to prevent juvenile delinquency. It’s another thing to think about the ways in which young people can thrive,” Price-Letscher said.
The types of organizations and work Ready to Rise is backing
To date, Ready to Rise has supported approximately 100 organizations, including R.A.C.E. (Reclaiming America’s Communities through Empowerment), Khmer Girls in Action, Community Coalition Power, InnerCity Struggle, EmpowHer Institute, Central American Resource Center (CARCEN) and California Youth Connection.
Another example, Students Deserve, is a youth-led organization that advocates for schools to divest from criminalization and policing, and invest in students who are disproportionately disadvantaged. Boasting more than 30 chapters across the Los Angeles Unified School District, Students Deserve and its partners have helped the district divest $25 million from the L.A. School Police Department, invest $120 million in resources and support for Black students and their families, and end daily random searches and school police use of pepper spray.
Another grantee, the previously mentioned Youth Justice Coalition, founded FREE (Fighting for the Revolution to Educate and Empower Los Angeles) LA High School in 2007, which offers systems-impacted youth between the age 16 and 24 the opportunity to obtain their high school diplomas. The school is located at YJC’s headquarters in Chuco’s Justice Center. Students can also receive training in social justice organizing and movement building. Once they graduate, students can enroll in a program for additional job training and placement or join YJC’s youth organizing program LOBOS (Leading Our Brothers and Sisters Out of the System). YJC also launched a fellowship to teach young people about how they can support and advocate for their communities.
“Part of our work for Ready to Rise, as well as LOBOS and FREE LA, is all toward that vision of an L.A. without youth incarceration that includes a decentralized network and ecosystem of community-based resources for housing, education and youth development so that young people can continue to grow, blossom and contribute to society,” said Justin Andrews Marks, co-executive director of YJC.
Beginning in November 2024, Youth Justice Coalition will be receiving $120,000 a year for three years from Ready to Rise. It also receives support from the Weingart Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, The California Endowment, Sierra Health Foundation and the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation.
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From youth incarceration to youth development in Los Angeles
In addition to seeing the closures of all state-level juvenile detention facilities, many Los Angeles detention centers have been shuttered, largely due to poor and unsafe conditions and a lack of adequate staffing. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has also asked the courts to place L.A. County’s juvenile halls in a receivership due to persistent violations at detention centers, including child endangerment and abuse, overdoses, and encouraging fights among detained youth.
Until recently, Los Angeles County did not invest robustly in youth success. Whereas cities like Atlanta, Boston and New York had dedicated programs for youth development, Los Angeles did not.
In 2022, however, Los Angeles County established the Department of Youth Development, which adheres to care-first solutions and invests in youth wellbeing and development, focusing particularly on young people and communities impacted by structural racism, poverty and criminalization.
“The return on investment for youth development is so much greater than incarceration,” YJC’s Marks said.
According to Small, for the same amount of money it would have cost to incarcerate 22 young people for one year, Ready to Rise was able to create meaningful experiences for 25,000 youth, offering them access to mentorship, job training, case management, and arts and culture.
“One of the biggest takeaways that has come out of Ready to Rise is that the data really showed what it did for the lives of young people — it helped them to have more autonomy and agency in their own lives. It helped them connect with trusted adults and peers in a way that fortified them. It enabled them to do better in work and school because they were able to meet their own goals in a different, more focused way,” Small said.
Recent developments continue to impact the landscape around youth incarceration in Los Angeles. In addition to the loss of federal funding this year, voters elected a “tough on crime” district attorney in 2024 and passed a state proposition that undid progressive criminal justice reform policies. Considering philanthropy’s role supporting those policies in California and elsewhere, and an ongoing political backlash against them in some cases, there are valid questions to be asked regarding if and how funders should revisit some of their approaches and narratives around justice reform to support at-risk youth over the long term.
Despite those uncertainties, Ready to Rise is well suited for the moment, Small said, and will continue to see building power amongst communities as a first line of response.
“It’s really core to remember that… we’re in a better position than ever before in terms of addressing the needs of young people,” Small said. “When you’re funding young people, when you’re funding families, you’re setting them up for the foundation that’s going to be able to handle anything else that’s coming through the political, economic or cultural landscape.”
