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treepeople.org Andy Lipkis began planting smog-tolerant trees with a group of fellow campers in the San Bernadino Forest in 1970 at age 15 and hasn't looked back. At age 17 he raised $10,000 to purchase 8,000 seedlings and he and family members also founded a nonprofit called  California Conservation Project. Over the years this eventually evolved into TreePeople. With a dedicated staff,  Andy still at the helm, and an army of volunteers the organization is on a mission to create what they call   Functioning Community Forest s throughout the greater LA area and anywhere around the country and the world their volunteers can touch including a project delivering over 8,000 fruit bearing trees to Africa. The initiative was not only good for the environment but also provided nutritious food sources to many in need. TreePeople’s Forestry program includes both Urban and Mountain Forestry. The Urban Forestry program empowers underserved communities with the i...

Nationwide, according a report from Children Uniting Nations, as of 2014 463,000 American children live in foster care. California has a larger number of children in the system than any other state based on a 2009 AFCARS report. facebook.com Generally at age 18 these young adults are considered “emancipated” and “age out” of the foster care system.  According to an article by John Kelly Editor-In-Chief of the Chronicle For Social Change and the Alliance for Children’s Rights, the number of young adults in California staying in the system for extended foster care up to age 21 has more than doubled since 2012 from 2,000 to over 5,000. The fact is whether at age 18 or 21 these young adults exit the system and then what? The answers are in the data from WELIFTLA and Alliance for Children’s Rights . ·          The stats for those exiting without any sort of housing have varied from 30 – 65% depending on the year ·   ...

Founded in 1988 the charity whose volunteers once built hiking trails, worked in libraries, and did myriad other tasks, has overhauled its service program to focus on a single mission: improving graduation rates in struggling public schools. The transformation was tied to a Johns Hopkins research study worked on by Robert Balfanz, brother of City Year's President  Jim Balfanz. According to the Johns Hopkins study the high-school dropout crisis is concentrated. Roughly 12 percent of the country’s high schools account for 50 percent of the students who don’t graduate. Says Robert Balfanz,  “It all sort of clicked in my mind,” he says. “They can give us a team of 10 to 15 corps members who are trained and focused and are in the building 7 to 7.” If each volunteer works with 15 students who show warning signs that they might drop out, he says, “we can now reach 150 to 200 kids a day with that constant nagging and nurturing.” The math and English tutoring and the vo...