LEARNSkills development, creative expression and team building through classic car restoration.
Lost Angels Children's Project engages at-risk youth through classic car restoration and customization to learn a trade, gain life skills and become empowered through team building activities.
Please describe your project proposal.
Lost Angels Children's Project provides an engaging after-school program serving local at-risk and foster youth. Twice a week, 10-13 youth attend the LACP facility to participate in workshops for two-hours. Youth, ages 11-19, learn classic car restoration and customizing techniques, which provide job and life skills training, character building, and enforces academic subjects of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).
Which of the LEARN metrics will your proposal impact?
Youth unemployment and underemployment
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
Antelope Valley
Describe in greater detail how your proposal will make LA the best place to LEARN?
LACP is committed to providing a safe after-school environment where the youth can develop skills necessary to take with them and elevate them beyond their present condition and become positive participants in their community, while learning a trade.
Along with learning how to work on cars, workshops foster and stimulate student creativity, critical independent thinking and personal responsibility. Each week the students are encouraged to challenge themselves and take the skills learned in the car restoration process to
create a work of art of their own design which opens inner self creative discovery and knowledge that everything learned in class can be applied to other fields. LACP gives our students a guide in which to develop practical skills they can take into the real world, and learn how these useful skills can be turned into a pathway to finding jobs and gratifying work in a field they enjoy -- without turning to the streets.
The overarching goal of LACP is to provide a minimum of 50 unduplicated at-risk, disadvantaged and foster youth with hands-on vocational skills training, mentorship, and development activities that can prevent anti-social behaviors, break the cycle of poverty, and promote a successful future.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your project.
Over a one-year period, LACP will achieve the following objectives:
1)Support the healthy development of approximately 50 unduplicated, at-risk, disadvantaged, and foster youth ages 11-19 over a one-year period.
2)Provide after-school workshops, with a healthy meal, for two-hours on Wednesday and Thursday each week with 10-15 students per session.
4)Teach youth how to safely and properly use tools, equipment and machinery that are necessary for working on automobiles.
5)Provide hands-on vocational skills training to learn how to bleed brakes, change oil, rotate tires, and other components of car maintenance and repair.
6)Provide a variety of media to translate skills into art and offer monthly educational field trips to explore Los Angeles County.
In order to measure the success of our programs, LACP will solicit feedback and take testimonials directly from the students. Currently, LACP is receiving positive responses from 100% of the youth participants that our services have changed their lives for the better. The youth have confirmed that LACP workshops have improved their vocational skills, given them an outlet for healthy self-expression, and have experienced things they never thought possible from the field trips. As LACP is a new organization, we are looking at additional ways of capturing program outcomes. Quantifiably, we track the number of students at each workshop session and the number of times they return to continue participating in LACP programming.
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed?
Money
Volunteers
Advisors/board members
Staff
Publicity/awareness
Infrastructure (building/space/vehicles etc.)