Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center

LYRIC is a nonprofit youth center for LGBTQQ youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its mission is to build community and inspire positive social change through education enhancement, career trainings, health promotion, and leadership development with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) youth, their families, and allies of all races, classes, genders, and abilities.

As part of the PropelNext partnership with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we are recommending grants to seven organizations in the Bay Area working with high-risk youth: Alternatives in Action, Beyond Emancipation, Community Youth Center of San Francisco, East Oakland Youth Development Center, Huckleberry Youth Programs, Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, and Social Advocates for Youth. We selected these organizations from a pool of forty-eight candidates, after a thorough due diligence process involving external reviewers. Of the seven recommended organizations, three are based in San Francisco, three in Oakland, and one in Sonoma County. These organizations help youth ages nine to twenty-four who are at risk of dropping out of school, involved in the juvenile justice system, runaway, homeless, foster youth, or suffering from domestic violence. The organizations help in a variety of ways, providing mentors, after-school programming, job training, tutoring, shelter, community service projects, and leadership opportunities. These seven organizations will participate in the PropelNext program over the next three years. Another eight organizations will also be participating in the PropelNext cohort, including two others in the Bay Area, funded by the Packard and Sobrato foundations, and six organizations in Southern California, funded by the Weingart Foundation. In addition to the grant funds, the PropelNext program will provide training, individual coaching, technical assistance, and peer learning sessions to help the organizations develop their theories of change and implement performance measurement systems. We hope this initiative will significantly strengthen these youth-serving organizations, build a more enduring performance-based culture in the nonprofit sector, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for Bay Area youth.