Los Angeles Team Mentoring (LATM) will be celebrating 32 years of service at our annual “Soirée” fundraiser on October 24th in Beverly Hills, CA. This year’s theme of “Evergreen” embodies the enduring and innovative spirit of LATM. Soirée helps garner critical resources needed to sustain our youth mentoring programs in underserved neighborhoods across Southern California. We humbly ask for your support and hope that you'll join your fellow change-makers, community leaders, and philanthropists in making a difference!  
 

About LATM:

Los Angeles Team Mentoring (LATM) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that has transformed over 32,000 young lives since its founding in 1992. We are now in our 32nd year of providing critical mentoring supports to inner-city youth across Southern California – and we have only been able to do so through the generous support of civic-minded organizations and individuals like YOU.

This year alone, over 900 mentees across Los Angeles & San Diego participated in LATM’s e-Works and TeamWorks programs. In those programs, youth have weekly access to a dynamic team of volunteer mentors who guide them through an interactive social-emotional learning curriculum and, more importantly, help them navigate the middle school years! This is a transformative time of identity formation and increased societal pressures...youth are learning who they are and who they want to be. With that in mind, LATM takes a proactive approach to keep them on track by connecting them with role models and by imparting skills that aid their personal growth and prepare them to graduate in a college-ready capacity. LATM’s curriculum addresses the 4 foundational needs of at-risk youth: belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity. Other focus areas include communication, effective listening, problem solving, conflict resolution, anger management, digital responsibility, life skills, and high school/college prep. Youth also attend educational field trips and partner-led workshops to expand their horizons and explore the world beyond their neighborhoods.

Third-party evaluations of LATM’s programs have consistently found positive impacts on mentees, as compared to non-program peers, across performance indicators like attendance, standardized assessments, GPA, and on-time high school promotion. A recent study showed that LATM mentees: (a) Achieved a mean GPA that was .41 points higher; (b) Scored 34 points higher in math and 26 points higher in English on the CAASP; (c) Sustained a higher rate of on-time grade promotion from 8th to 12th grade, which is a critical indicator of whether students will graduate high school. In addition, mentees have reported positive changes in personal growth areas like self-confidence, resilience, emotional self-regulation, and relationship-building. Mentors have said that they’ve benefitted greatly from their volunteer experience as well. One said, “This is the most important thing I do all week.” Another added, “I find the lessons meaningful. They don’t teach these things in classroom settings. Coming from a similar background, I would have wanted to have had these lessons in middle school about life, culture, and society.”