We are pleased to highlight one of our impactful clients, Calibrate, an organization dedicated to healing, connection, and leadership development in under-resourced communities. Through its trauma-informed and data-driven Connections program, Calibrate creates safe spaces where individuals can build resilience, strengthen relationships, and unlock their full potential.
By investing in community members as leaders and facilitators, Calibrate is creating a powerful cycle of reinvestment and transformation across Los Angeles County. We connected with their team to learn more about their story, mission, and the meaningful impact they are making every day.
Tell us about Calibrate.
Calibrate has been operating since August 2019, but our foundational program Connections has been used across all industries and sectors since first implemented in 1984 at Crossroads School in Los Angeles.
Connections is a data-driven, trauma-informed practice that promotes resiliency skills, healing, and community-building, by bringing people together in a circle and structured process to share experiences and listen from their hearts.
Founded and led by alumni and their teachers who experienced Connections in South LA schools and witnessed its transformative impact – 95% of students completed post-secondary degrees as compared to 17% of their local peers – Calibrate is a community reinvestment model whereby Connections alumni are trained and paid to run Calibrate’s operations.
Calibrate currently serves 2,000 people per year, kindergarten through adult, at 19 locations in under-resourced communities.
Calibrate’s program partners include the Los Angeles County Youth Commission (systems-impacted youth), College Corps, Good Shepherd Shelter, local schools, colleges, and nonprofits.
As community and relational builders, Calibrate’s team brings relevant stakeholders into the Connections experience so that all participants, regardless of disparate levels of power, prestige, and access, are invited to cultivate a common language and experience that can serve as a bridge to overcome division.
Learn more about Calibrate on the web and Instagram @calibrate.earth.
What is your primary goal?
In collaboration with our program partners, Calibrate generates a virtuous cycle of community reinvestment that starts with providing spaces for children, their parents, teachers, and community members to heal intergenerational PTSD and Adverse Childhood Experiences & Environments (ACEs) and then extends to training and leadership opportunities for alumni and community members to expand wellness work and elevate next generations.
Can you describe your mission, vision and core values?
We calibrate: We transform and elevate the lives of tomorrow’s leaders from under-resourced communities, particularly the descendants of American slavery, by providing spaces where they experience their best selves, feel valued for the potential they bring to the world, and prepare to reinvest their time and talents back into their communities.
Vision Statement: We heal. We build leaders. We are Los Angeles’s premier social-emotional learning and training program designed to transform under-resourced communities. Over the last 30 years, our programming has quantitatively and qualitatively correlated to better lives. Program participants have more stable relationships, higher levels of economic contribution, and lead communities in a virtuous cycle of reinvestment and elevating the lives of underserved youth.
From healing to leading, Calibrate’s mission in action consists of Connections, Training, and Community Engagement as a model of community empowerment and reinvestment:
Connections®: In 2024 and 2025 Los Angeles County Youth Commission surveys of 1,000 of our county’s most vulnerable youth, the #1 request is for mental wellness support. Connections is a place where individuals grow in self and community appreciation because the curriculum is centered on valuing their experience.
Training: Our youth deserve thriving role models who share their lived experience. This means generating meaningful, paid opportunities for those leaders to reinvest their gifts – and – continuing to support their personal and professional growth.
Calibrate® is powered by a diverse multigenerational and deeply interconnected community that is predominantly composed of Connections® alumni. 95% of Calibrate’s staff and 75% of our board have shared lived experience with youth we serve.
Community Engagement: Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy (2021-2025) decrees the U.S. has a loneliness and social isolation epidemic and calls for programs to strengthen social connections. Calibrate is a community-builder: whenever possible, we expand Connections programming so that all stakeholders (e.g., parents, staff, volunteers) have access to a shared vocabulary. Community engagement also represents intentionally building coalitions with mission-aligned entities to maximize our collective impact.
Who are the communities you serve?
Though Calibrate has traveled to other cities to introduce Connections, we are currently focused on under-resourced communities across LA County. Within LA County, most of our program partners are located in Supervisorial District 2 (e.g., South LA, Watts, Compton), where most of our team resides.
Calibrate currently serves 2,000 people per year, kindergarten through adult, at 19 locations in under-resourced communities.
Calibrate’s program partners include the Los Angeles County Youth Commission (systems-impacted youth), College Corps, Good Shepherd Shelter, local schools, colleges, and nonprofits.
We have touched numerous sectors, such as: foster youth, transition-age formerly systems-impacted youth; families and staff at a domestic violence shelter; students, parents, teachers, and volunteers at schools and nonprofits; first-generation college students; at Cal Poly Pomona we’ve worked with 14 departments, including the Women’s Basketball Team, who just went to the Sweet 16!
How are volunteers a part of your organization? How can people get involved?
Volunteers are a profound support for Calibrate’s administrative operations, such as accounting, HR, grant writing, social media. Of course, board members are volunteers. We have one program location that requires Connections facilitators to be volunteers. Email: connect@calibrate.earth or Direct Message @calibrate.earth on Instagram.
How has your organization grown?
When Calibrate started programming in August 2019, we were a team of 10 serving 3 locations and 125 people. Over the past 7 years, we’ve trained 750 community leaders and reached more than 8,000 people, kindergarten-adult. On an annual basis our team of 50 works with 12 locations full-time, e.g., providing Connections to children 1x/week while also collaborating on 30-40 community-building events where Connections is used to deepen the impact and purpose of the gathering.
At the end of each program cycle, Calibrate collects anonymous qualitative data that we quantify through internships we offer to first-generation college. 100% of Connections participants report multiple gains, such as developing healthy coping mechanisms and productive communication skills; increasing self-esteem, homework completion and classroom engagement; improving relationships with teachers, family, and peers; and, practicing self-efficacy and accountability. There are numerous testimonials of Connections playing a serious or critical role in a participant’s life, such as eliminating suicidal ideation or supporting a critical choice moment, e.g., finishing high school or college. Connections alumni report that connection to Calibrate has inspired them to pursue post-secondary degrees, seek meaningful work, and use Connections as a tool with family, friends, and colleagues.
In 2025 Calibrate was honored by LA County for our work with LA County Youth Commission. We have received additional support from the City of LA Offices of the Mayor (both Mayors Bass and and Garcetti), LA Council District 15, and LA County Supervisor 2nd District. In 2022 Calibrate was part of the LA Rams first cohort of “pLAymakers” and an LA Clippers Community Hero in 2021. Calibrate received Good Shepherd Shelter’s (Catholic Charities) Mission Partner Award and has been featured on CBS-2/KCAL-9 five times.
Examples of high school seniors’ anonymous survey responses [sic]:
- “I’ve grown more confident when i speak which has served me well throughout the years as I struggle with social anxiety. Also I have grown more closer to people and felt enriched with beautiful connections. It’s truly saved my high school years. I learned how to take care of myself and how to stay true to my values. I take that to me everywhere as I am no stranger to cutting off connections or having a falling off. They further encouraged personal growth. Being honest to myself, identifying what I can handle, prioritizing mental health.”
- “I feel like I have become much more appreciative of the people around me. I didn’t really realize how grateful I am for the community I’ve been given until after thinking about it during connection circles. My ability to ‘listen with the heart’ has definitely been transmitted to all sectors of my life because of connections. I feel so much better about my ability to connect with people whether it is at school with friends and teachers or at home with my family. connections has definitely taught me the importance of deep conversations with them. I have learned that there is always a space for what we care about, in college I look forward to finding clubs and other spaces filled with people who care about the same things as I do.”
- “Being low income, success is having extrinsic valuable things, whether that’s money, cars, house – things that we never grew up with. Connections is where I built confidence because I got my feet wet with what it’s like to reflect. Self discovery is the start of having goals. I came from a school that didn’t have a college counselor or a real counselor, so what really were my opportunities to open up? Connections makes it okay to open up, to find out who we really are.”
What do your donor dollars allow you to do?
Donor dollars pay facilitators (i.e., alumni and community leaders in under-resourced neighborhoods) to provide Connections to youth where Connections is their only safe space to heal and learn resiliency skill sets. Donor dollars also pay alumni of Connections and local community leaders to train and become Connections facilitators, so that community building and wellness practices can exponentially spread to all aspects of their lives – e.g., where they live, work, socialize.
What makes your organization unique?
Though there are other organizations in Los Angeles that provide Connections (called Council, Mysteries, Life Skills), we are the only nonprofit that directs 100% of donor dollars to under-resourced communities, youth, and vulnerable populations such as foster youth. In addition, we are the only nonprofit that provides a community reinvestment model of training alumni and local leaders to run Calibrate’s programs and operations.
What are the biggest challenges your organization faces?
Of course, since January 2025 with devastating fires and changes in government funding, the nonprofit / philanthropy sector, particularly in LA County, has been facing financial challenges. Thus, Calibrate has been incubating entrepreneurial ideas to supplement revenue streams, such as our @SpreadFeelGood merchandise created by one of our alumni.
Calibrate started operating 7 months before the pandemic; since quarantine we have served as mental health first-responders, e.g., providing Connections for families and foster youth in Altadena after our county’s devastating fires in January 2025. ICE raids and economic changes have deeply impacted our communities; Calibrate’s team is impacted by the same factors as the youth they serve, so it is critical that we fill our team’s cup with support so they have capacity to pour into their communities.
How has Evergreen Alliance impacted the work you do?
Evergreen has been a mentor and guide who has helped Calibrate grow and succeed, by educating us about the why behind elements of the 990 and how it provides a framework for marrying numbers and narrative, articulating vision and mission, structuring our internal accounting system, and informing nonprofit systems, compliance, procedures, and policies. Evergreen is part of the DNA of Calibrate, and we are forever grateful.
