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By participating in our FREE Vehicle Donation Program where YOU get to help us! A major source of our financial support is from vehicle donations. In the process, you may get a great tax advantage yourself.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

There are a wealth of opportunities for assisting Los Angeles Youth Supportive Services/ The Youth Rescue Fund to continue its mission of providing counseling, social and supportive services to youth in crisis. Here are some of the ways YOU can help!

The Need for Community Financial Support

Volunteer Opportunities

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The Need For Community Financial Support

For most of our 15 years of existance, we have received our major funding from a vehicle donation program. Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress, in an effort to plug a very small hole in the tax law, changed the way donors could claim a deduction for their vehicle from the Blue Book Fair Market Value to what we actually received when we sold the vehicle. The unintended consequence of that change was a huge loss of donations. We went from about $140,000 per year before the change to about $12,000 last year, because unfortunately most people now sell their car privately and pocket the cash.

In these days of shrinking governmental support for programs like ours, the need for a committment of support from the community has become an absolute neccessity. Only with support from individuals, businesses and foundations will we be able to continue to provide these services so critical to the welfare of our youth. The LAYSS staff works long hours, sometimes in the face of personal physical risk, to make sure that our youth are cared for. Your tax deductible contribution will be a vote of confidence to them, as well as having an immediate impact on the lives of over two hundred youths.

All that you have read about our accomplishments has only been possible because of the gererosity of our contributors who, in the absence of any governmental support, have kept us going and growing for the last five years. We hold our overhead to a bare minimum so that most of your contribution will go into direct services to our youth. Your generous support will allow us to finally reach all our areas' youth that are so desperately in need of our services.

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Volunteer Opportunities

Due to our extremely limited funding and lack of paid staff, volunteers from the Los Angeles community directly impact upon the quality and quantity of service that we are able to provide.

By clicking on this link, you will be magically transported to the VolunteerMatch site where our current needs are regularly updated: (to return here when you are finished, either use the "back button" on your brouser or click on our URL at the bottom of their page.)

We always have on-going needs for assistance in the following are some of the areas:

Public Relations:

1. We have a dire need for an experienced public relations person who will assist us in getting out to the press and the public the good news about what we are doing and our accomplishments.

Fund Raising

1. People who can host fundraisers at their homes.
2. People who can assist at fundraising functions.
3. Individuals and businesses who can financially lend their support.

Counseling

We are in need of masters level mental health professionals to volunteer as staff for our 24/7 youth telephone hotline. This is an on-call, periodic commitment that can be done from your own phone.

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Please write to Jason Wittman, the Executive Director with your comments and questions.