Be A Mentor, the California Mentoring Partnership, the Alliance for Children’s Rights and the L.A. Opportunity Youth Collaborative came together in December 2023 to launch a youth-driven mentoring network for systems-involved youth countywide in Los Angeles, known as the Youth Mentoring Nexus (YMN). We focus our efforts on young people, middle school through adulthood, who have experienced foster care, juvenile justice, and related systems. The goal of this network is to create better access to robust networks of peer and adult relationships for young people in these systems and situations.

The Nexus is building partnerships across sectors to scale and improve mentoring for systems-involved youth across the Los Angeles region. We work collaboratively with government agencies, young adults with lived expertise, and philanthropic and community-based organizations. We utilize five strategic priorities, centering youth experience, to improve systems and better support youth through a long-term and sustainable collective impact approach.