Violence Prevention For Systems-Impacted Youth

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Nest seeks to reduce all forms of harm for children, particularly systems-impacted youth and foster children. Young people face an alarming amount of exposure to severe, pervasive, and/or chronic traumatic experiences– 1 in 5 high schoolers are bullied at school, ~3 million children witness a shooting each year, and 77% of schools reported violent incidents in 2019-20. Home stressors and a world fraught with conflict make it difficult to cope and contribute to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. In the U.S., 1 in 3 adolescents experience a mental health disorder, and tragically, we lose 17 teens a day to suicide. Youth from the foster system, with adverse childhood experiences, and/or exposed to trauma are especially vulnerable. Yet acts of violence can often be traced back to one act of harm– what if we could prevent that act? Nest provides comprehensive violence prevention, based upon insights from classroom education, counseling, neuroscience, and child development.

Nest seeks to disrupt cycles of harm and violence and help foster resiliency and empathy in students across LAUSD, with special emphasis on the 100 high priority / highest-need schools. To achieve this, Nest will continue to offer and build upon its existing, successful You Belong Here (YBH) violence prevention program–currently in use across LAUSD since 2020– through expanded teacher training and materials for parents and foster families. Our proven social-emotional learning framework helps students build empathy, accountability, gratitude, and emotional agility, and has reached over 3.5 million children. We also train teachers/counselors to teach YBH, yet currently only 194 educators have received training due to lack of professional development funds. We will therefore hire and train four additional trainers to host 15-20 six-hour trainings; this will result in 500 additional educators prepared for YBH in high priority schools. Nest also sees a critical need for expanded resources for parents and foster families, so they can support youth at home and in the community. We will therefore host listening sessions with parents, kids, and foster families from LAUSD’s high priority schools to inform the design, format, and distribution of these materials– to be shared by fall 2025. Materials will raise awareness and help families model key skills like emotional agility and accountability; this will reinforce what students learn in class for a more effective, long-term outcome.

Nest is committed to creating a secure, nurturing environment where LA County youth can prosper, free from violence and emotional distress. Our program addresses root causes of violence to create a future where every child has the resilience to navigate challenges with strength and empathy. Our neuroscience-based methods educate students on emotional regulation and its pivotal role in preventing violence. We expect improved attendance and academic performance, fewer incidences of violence and bullying, decreased mental health issues and suicidal ideation, and improved school climate assessments. We also expect earlier identification of victimization and problematic behaviors by youth. Nest is growing– we seek partnerships with school districts across the country and evolve our curriculum to meet needs. We started with sexual exploitation prevention, expanded into healthy relationships, and now are growing YBH, which tackles the interconnectedness of all forms of violence and harm.

Nest has robust evaluation protocols to ensure that our programming is effective and having the intended impact. For curricula, we do pre/post-surveys and focus groups with educators and students; we look for student skill retention and increases in empathy, conflict resolution skills, bystander intervention skills, help-seeking behavior, consent skills, emotion agility, resilience, a sense of belonging, and connectedness. For educator training, we do pre/post- surveys to ensure comfort, confidence, and skill teaching sensitive topics. To measure success of family engagement, we will track attendance at Nest Family Nights and parent workshops, and give pre/post-surveys to assess understanding of risk factors and involvement in addressing them. We will also collect feedback on the effectiveness and relevance of engagement activities. To provide a comprehensive view of impact on student success, we will collect data on attendance, grades, and behavior to correlate with family engagement.