September 2025
Table of Contents
Bold Vision is a multi-sector, multi-generational initiative that aims to fundamentally improve the lives of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) children and youth, creating lasting change in our communities by expanding paths towards success for young people across Los Angeles County. Bold Vision’s central goal is to promote BIPOC youth thriving. To accomplish this goal, Bold Vision develops youth leadership and builds youth-led systems change campaigns. Data is a vital tool to measure how youth of color are thriving, or lacking the resources and guidance necessary to reaching their fullest potential. To that end, Bold Vision released its first data-driven report measuring how well youth are thriving across Los Angeles in 2022 and a follow up mid-term report in 2024 with updated indicators. These reports document the racial and geographic inequities youth face in the county. What remained missing was a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how young people themselves perceive their own well-being, and the complex factors that contribute to or inhibit their ability to thrive. The Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey (BVYTS) aims to fill that gap. Through collaboration with more than 40 youth-serving community-based organizations (CBOs), the BVYTS collected responses from over 3,000 youth ages 15-24 in L.A. County.
The BVYTS is the first and largest of its kind survey in L.A. County, providing a powerful, inclusive look at how young people of all identities are doing—from their own perspectives. It provides a path forward, grounded in data, for understanding what drives youth thriving in L.A. County and where action is most needed to improve youth thriving. The survey was distributed through 41 CBOs and eight community events. CBOs' youth leaders also invited their friends to complete the survey. In total, 3,444 valid survey responses were collected.
The BVYTS included 62 questions across seven different components of youth thriving. Bold Vision identified these components based on prior research and engaging subject matter experts and young people. Components included: strong mental health and minds, positive identity and hope, supportive social connections, vibrant communities, safety, cultural identity, and racial equity, opportunity, and inclusion. The survey also included 15 demographic questions to measure differences in youth thriving across and within youth subgroups. Some of these included race, immigration status, sexual orientation or gender identification, age, housing status, criminal legal system involvement, and employment/ education status.
The questionnaire and sampling strategy were developed through a community-engaged process, drawing on existing youth thriving measures, findings from youth interviews and prior research, and guidance from Bold Vision’s former Community Council alongside the Survey Advisory Group—a collaborative of youth development and survey experts co-facilitated by Imoyase Community Support Services (ICSS) and Catalyst California.
This work would not have been possible without deep collaboration from our research partners and the community-based organizations that collected surveys. Catalyst California serves as the lead research consultant for the initiative. The Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), under the guidance of the Youth Council and Steering Committee, serves as the anchor organization for Bold Vision. We would like to thank the former Bold Vision Community Council, Bold Vision Youth Council, Bold Vision Steering Committee, and members of the Bold Vision Survey Advisory Group (SAG) for their contributions. Feedback from these stakeholders was imperative to Catalyst California designing and analyzing the BVYTS.
We would like to thank Imoyase Community Support Services and the Community Health Equity Group for their contributions to designing and implementing the Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey. Cheryl Grills, Ph.D., Sandra Villanueva, Ph.D., Elia De La Cruz Toledo He, Ph.D., Peter Rej, Ph.D., Diane Terry, Ph.D., and other staff at Imoyase Community Support Services conducted the literature review for the survey and led the design of the survey questionnaire and sampling plan. Jason Douglas, Ph.D. (University of California Irvine), Andy Subica, Ph.D. (UC Riverside), Aerika Loyd, Ph.D. (UC Riverside), and UC Irvine (UCI) graduate researchers led the data collection and received Institutional Review Board approval for the survey implementation from UCI. We would also like to thank the 41 youth-serving organizations who distributed the BVYTS and helped this survey represent a broad cross-section of L.A. County youth.
Lastly, we would like to thank the Bold Vision Survey Advisory Group members who have helped shape the survey and report since 2022. This includes: Dr. David Turner, Assistant Professor of Black Life & Racial Justice, University of California Los Angeles; Dr. Fiorella Carlos Chavez, Assistant Professor in Community Health, Arizona State University; Royce Park, Assistant Director of Survey Planning and Operations for the California Health Interview Survey, University of California Los Angeles; Sahar Moheize, Research, Policy, & Innovation Director, L.A. County Department of Youth Development; Dr. Veronica Terriquez, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles; and Dr. Yan Cui, Supervising Epidemiologist, L.A. County Department of Public Health.
We originally identified ten components to youth thriving based on a literature review, input from the SAG, and feedback from youth. We developed the BVYTS based on these 10 components, but prioritized specific items to shorten the length of the survey. Seven components were selected to be measured in the BVYTS based on SAG feedback, youth group interviews, ICSS expertise, Bold Vision's priorities, and data gaps not covered in Bold Vision's prior reports. These components were further refined and split into subcomponents as needed based on our data analysis. The final seven components, and their respective subcomponents, from our analysis included:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Strong Mental Health and Minds | A positive mental health, cognitive development, and emotions. Including the subcomponent psychological distress. |
| Positive Identity and Hope | A strong sense of self, self-efficacy, purpose, and hope for the future. Including the subcomponent self-efficacy and hope for the future and sparks. In the Brighter Futures report, we treat sparks as a separate component given that it works as a predictor of youth thriving. |
| Supportive Social Connections | Stable, caring relationships, and connections with one's community. Including the subcomponents caring families and relationships and opportunities for community involvement. |
| Racial Equity, Opportunity, and Inclusion | Feeling accepted in all spaces without the threat of being treated unfairly due to one's racial identity. Including the subcomponents microaggressions and structural racism. In the Brighter Futures report, we treat cultural identity as a subcomponent to Racial Equity, Opportunity, and Inclusion given their relationship. |
| Cultural Identity | Feeling connected to one's culture or traditions. This component is also considered a subcomponent to Racial Equity, Opportunity, and Inclusion in the Brighter Futures report. |
| Vibrant Communities | Safe access to local resources and public spaces in one's community. This component is not discussed in detail in the Brighter Futures report. |
| Safety | Feeling safe in one's neighborhoods. This component is not discussed in detail in the Brighter Futures report. |
To learn more about the detailed methodology behind the BVYTS data collection and analysis, please see the methodology documentation here.
To read the findings from the survey analysis, please see Bold Vision's Brighter Futures: The Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey report here.
In this repository, you will find five folders corresponding to different aspects of the Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey and Brighter Futures report.
- Data Prep and Quality | Scripts that were developed to clean, recode, and weight the raw survey data. These were used to prepare the survey data for analysis.
- Descriptive and Demographic Analysis | Scripts that run frequency and cross-tabulation tables focused on the demographics and distribution of survey responses. These were used to describe responses to each survey question by select demographic characteristics.
- Factor Analysis and Correlations | Scripts that run correlations, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling on the survey data. These were used to identify the key predictors of youth thriving and identify key components to highlight in the report.
- Visuals | Scripts that produce the visuals included in the Brighter Futures Report as well as copies of the visual images. Subfolders are organized by the original BVYTS components. See the "About the BVYTS Components" section to understand how to navigate to the appropriate component from the Brighter Futures report.
All scripts reference tables saved in our private postgres database. As such, the analysis included in the report cannot be reproduced without access to the data.
We completed the data cleaning, analysis, and visualization using the following software:
We used several R packages to analyze data and perform different functions, including the following.
- dplyr
- sf
- tidyr
- usethis
- RPostgres
- readxl
- stringr
- rpostgis
- ggplot2
- janitor
- purrr
- tidyverse
- data.table
- srvyr
- survey
- tidycensus
- forcats
- lavaan
- psych
- fastDummies
- car
- extrafont
- showtext
- ggtext
- patchwork
- scales
- kableExtra
To install these in your R environment, you may use:
list.of.packages <- c("dplyr","sf","tidyr","usethis","RPostgres","readxl","stringr","rpostgis","ggplot2","janitor","purrr","tidyverse","data.table","srvyr","survey","tidycensus","forcats","lavaan","psych","fastDummies","car","extrafont","showtext","ggtext","patchwork","scales","kableExtra)
new.packages <- list.of.packages[!(list.of.packages %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"])]
if(length(new.packages)) install.packages(new.packages)
devtools::install_github("r-lib/usethis")
library(dplyr)
library(sf)
library(tidyr)
library(usethis)
library(RPostgres)
library(readxl)
library(stringr)
library(rpostgis)
library(ggplot2)
library(janitor)
library(purrr)
library(tidyverse)
library(data.table)
library(srvyr)
library(survey)
library(tidycensus)
library(forcats)
library(lavaan)
library(psych)
library(fastDummies)
library(car)
library(extrafont)
library(showtext)
library(ggtext)
library(patchwork)
library(scales)
library(kableExtra)
Elycia Mulholland Graves - egraves[at]catalystcalifornia.org
Maria T. Khan - mkhan[at]catalystcalifornia.org
To cite Brighter Futures: The Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey report:
Catalyst California. Brighter Futures: The Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey. Los Angeles, CA: Bold Vision, 2025. https://www.boldvisionla.org/reports/.
To cite the Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey:
Catalyst California and the Social Justice Learning Institute, Bold Vision Youth Thriving Survey, 2024.
A world where systems are designed for justice and support equitable access to resources and opportunities for all Californians to thrive.
Catalyst California advocates for racial justice by building power and transforming public systems. We partner with communities of color, conduct innovative research, develop policies for actionable change, and shift money and power back into our communities.
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