⚡️💡 Great ideas from Angelenos you should know about ⚡️💡

Every year, we get hundreds of great ideas through the My LA2050 Grants Challenge, but we can only select a limited number to receive grants. Still, we want you to learn about and feel inspired by even more creative projects from your fellow Angelenos.

Shout out to the following organizations for being some of our favorite ideas outside of the ones funded through the grants challenge. Check out our blog post for more details on each of these projects!

LEARN

Promesa Boyle Heights will launch a unique peer mentorship program that bridges middle school, high school, and college students by providing at-risk and high-performing students

Coalition for Responsible Community Development's CURE violence prevention effort expands and promotes alternative sentencing for low-income youth aged 18-25 as a violence prevention and learning strategy.

Parents Education League will create a series of accessible “Public Service Mini-Courses on Early Childhood Education" to educate families on the importance of early childhood education and the criteria to find fitting early childhood environments.

Garage Board Shop's SK8 4 Education after school program motivates at-risk youth by combining skateboarding with education.

BUILD inspires students from under-resourced communities to graduate from high school, develop critical life skills, and achieve post-secondary success through the highly engaging experience of launching their very own businesses.

CREATE

Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network will provide three 12-week cycles of multi-disciplinary arts in youth detention camps/halls and Juvenile Day Reporting Centers across LA County, in order to build youth resiliency, foster wellness and support career pathways to creative economies after release.

Jobs to Move America plans to launch an electric bus campaign for a more equitable transition to zero emission bus fleets, while stimulating the creation of manufacturing jobs.

mitu's Accelerate LA discovers aspiring Latino digital filmmakers, connects them to community organizations and partners, and trains them to create digital content for the Latino millennial audience.

Los Angeles LISC seeks to empower four culturally diverse neighborhoods to negotiate the change process and develop a robust approach for leveraging culture as a tool for promoting sustainable neighborhood identities and economic development.

Impact Hub Los Angeles is using virtual reality to change public perception and help create law enforcement that is reflective of the community it protects.

Think Tank Productions will connect arts event producers with city agents and craft an online system connecting owners of vacant/uninhabited buildings to artists that can create vibrant events in underutilized spaces and neighborhoods.

Concerned Capital + Crowdfund Better will identify 10 "at-risk for relocation" manufacturing companies and re-tool them with digital communications, enterprise crowdfunding and/or management capacity.

The Billboard Creative will mount an art exhibition on billboards featuring works from emerging Los Angeles artists.

EMX Los Angeles provides opportunities for students to learn to be future DJs and electronic music production.

PLAY

Community Corporation of Santa Monica brings the Boys and Girls Club youth-development activities directly to kids in their home communities.

Perceptoscope will deploy augmented reality pedestal viewers at strategic locations around the city taking into account the context, communities and histories of the spaces in which they're dropped.

Clockshop create programs and events that bring Angelenos to experience “the Bowtie," a plot of post-industrial land on the LA River.

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab's CARPE LA is a mobile experience designed to get teams of kids and adults outside to play a story-driven, location-based game in parks throughout LA.

CONNECT

ARGO Labs builds, operates and maintains pioneering data infrastructure to transform how basic public services like street quality, water reliability, and education volunteering are delivered.

Bicycle Culture Institute wants to build an app that connects people on bikes to better understand their city streets and infrastructure.

Open Ballot LA is building a new data platform that will work to transition LA's elected office data into a streamlined and open platform, creating a new database that allow users to see all available elected offices, filing windows, salaries, requirements, and competitors.

Get Lit–Words Unite fuses classic and spoken word poetry to increase teen literacy and cultivate enthusiastic learners emboldened to inspire social consciousness in diverse communities.

LIVE

LA Compost is working to create a local solution to food waste through composting hubs in Los Angeles.

Podshare will build a pilot co-living pod program for transitional housing for Homeless Youth in Hollywood.

Planned Parenthood SGV aims to be the first health centers in northeast LA and the San Gabriel Valley to offer sliding-scale PrEP.

LA Food Policy Council will catalyze, coordinate and connect over 300 local organizations and hundreds more stakeholders to create a NEW Good Food For All Agenda – a visionary policy platform for health and resiliency in our local food system.

Global Green USA will work with local communities to develop a model for Resilience Hubs in neighborhoods throughout the County, in the face of natural disasters and extreme weather.

Community Health Councils' Safe Spaces for Healthy Places will motivate residents to get involved with the Community Plan (CP) process through Neighborhood Councils (NC) in South LA.