We are Young People to the Front. HQ is our third space in Los Angeles, and it is the thing we are asking you to help keep open.

We are Young People to the Front. We run HQ, a prosocial third space in Los Angeles where young adults building stability after homelessness, and the grassroots groups working alongside them, have the infrastructure to organize, create, and act together. Your gift keeps it open.

Here is what makes us different. We do not run a slate of programs and recruit people into them. We build the infrastructure that lets other people build. The folding chairs, the equipment, the collaborative space, the room to try something. HQ is where emerging groups, mutual aid crews, grassroots organizers, artists, and young adults recovering from homelessness come to land, work, and grow. It has a creative, DIY, grassroots feeling on purpose. Not a sterile coalition room. A place that feels like the community it serves.

We started in 2018 as a research and policy firm. Our work with and for young adults recovering from homelessness pulled us into community-building, and community-building pulled us into power-building. The model was co-created with young people over time. We do not lead with a campaign. We lead with trust, belonging, artistic expression, and connection. From those relationships, leaders emerge, coalitions form, and collective action follows.

That is what a prosocial third space is. Community infrastructure that makes collective action possible. Because HQ exists, our community does not have to build relationships from scratch every time a crisis appears. When SNAP cuts land, when a ballot measure comes up, when the next thing no one predicted arrives, people already know one another, trust one another, and know how to act together.

You saw it work this year. A team of three finished building out HQ and opened the doors last October. When the federal shutdown hit and food security got worse, the community ran a food drive out of HQ, and a member food pantry grew out of it that is now permanent. When ICE raids swept the neighborhood and people stopped leaving home, they ran another. None of that comes from a program we run. It comes from the space existing and the trust already being there.

We also officially became a nonprofit this year, and we carried real weight, including legal debt from an arbitration that finally closed after eighteen months. We are small, we are holding a lot, and this space is worth holding.

This is a fundraiser for general operating support. The least glamorous, most important kind of money. It keeps the lights on, the doors unlocked, and the chairs out. It keeps three people doing the work of many. And it protects the civic infrastructure that keeps producing community power long after any single campaign or grant ends.

If you have ever wanted to back something small, local, and real, this is it.

Fund the space where community power gets built