Young Women’s Freedom Center & the Liberation Fund
By Lisa Small, Senior Director, Youth & Transformative Justice
Return to NewsletterLos Angeles County paid a staggering $4 billion settlement—the largest of its kind in U.S. history—for nearly 7,000 childhood sexual abuse claims in its juvenile detention and foster care systems. The question for philanthropy is not if we act, but how and how fast.
For Liberty Hill Foundation, the answer includes turning to and resourcing the leaders and organizations on the frontlines who understand the real impact of these systemic failures on children’s lives, and what happens when those children grow up to see these harms replicated across generations.
The Young Women’s Freedom Center is one of Liberty Hill’s partners that does the critical work of serving systems-involved young women, girls, and gender-expansive youth in Los Angeles County. Where public systems have failed and erased their experiences, YWFC has held these young people in esteem and has provided gender-specific and trauma-informed services that not only works to heal youth but support them in their leadership development and empowerment.
YWFC has been a transformative force for justice-involved youth across California for 30 years. Over the past five years, they have successfully expanded their model in Los Angeles County, demonstrating a proven track record in reducing recidivism and supporting young people to realize their full potential and build self-sufficiency. They are an anchor organization in our Liberation Fund, building on their long-established models for ensuring that girls and gender expansive youth can get free from system involvement and then thrive when they return to their communities.
YWFC’s approach is holistic and transformative, integrating policy advocacy, organizing, leadership development, narrative change work, mentorship, and peer engagement all under one roof, showing once and for all that we can support young people better and more effectively than the lowest common denominator of keeping them in broken and harmful systems.
We are living through a time of moral clarity. Foundations cannot remain neutral while the urgency of this moment demands we act decisively and swiftly. In the face of generational harm, YWFC is building generational freedom.
Liberty Hill is proud to stand alongside this organization and all our partners showing up every day to fight for the freedom, justice and dignity of our young people. The time is now to act.
