A year and a half after Los Angeles County shut a pair of emergency shelters for hard-to-place foster youth, Astrid Heppenstall Heger is still working to find ways to reach the county’s “invisble children.”
Last week, Heger’s Violence Intervention Program (VIP) opened the doors of the Leonard Hill Hope Center, a space that she hopes will help Los Angeles County’s most vulnerable foster youth – those who are at the highest risk of leaving county-run care and ending up homeless, being sexually trafficked or without access to healthcare services.
The Leonard Hill Hope Center is near VIP’s offices on the campus of the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in East Los Angeles, where it offers health and mental health services to about 19,000 children each year who have suffered abuse and neglect.
Built at a cost of more than $3 million, Hope Center will offer programming to at-risk transition-age foster youth who often have bounced between several foster homes and have frequently run away from placements. According to VIP staff, this includes mental health support, educational tools, peer support groups, specialty services for LGBTQ foster teens and life skills, including learning cooking in a brand-new kitchen.
[For more on this story by Jeremy Loudenback, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...s-foster-youth/28229]
Photo: The kitchen at the Leonard Hill Hope Center, where youth will learn cooking skills
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