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Today, 21-year-old former foster youth Tyara "Tee" Clark turns to her faith, dance and advocacy work to keep her going and help her find balance in her life. She’s currently studying education and hopes to become a teacher one day.

Shari talks about the impact of her 15 mentors and how a new mobile school launching in fall of 2017 will expand foster youth's education in Los Angeles.

The former foster youth, who grew up in San Bernardino County and was placed in foster care at the age of 12, was ultimately reunified with her family–a fact which doesn’t happen often.

Brittany Cannon is 24 years old and lives in Los Angeles. Before she headed west from Florida, she spent most of her upbringing in tumultuous situations with her mother who suffers from untreated mental illness. She and her siblings moved around a lot, bouncing from foster home to foster home to kinship care. Today, Brittany is attending college and interning with the California Youth Connection.

At the age of 24, Marisa works at Children’s Law Center of California (CLC) in Los Angeles, where she helps foster youth access the resources they need to advocate for themselves. Marisa spent her early years shuffling between relatives in Mexico and California before going into foster care at the age of 12.

Here are 20 of our favorite happenings in July, hand-picked for your social calendar. July 4FOURTH OF JULYThere are so many July Fourth celebrations…

Every morning before school, 17-year-old Lonnell rises before dawn to make his way to the football field at Manual Arts High School. At 6:00 a.m., he’s out of his aunt’s home near the Crenshaw Plaza and on a bus to his South Los Angeles high school.

Josh Elizondo, 20, is an advocate with California Youth Connection (CYC), a statewide youth-led organization focused on improving foster care policy.

When Briana Spencer was 23 years old, she took her first yoga class at Santa Monica City College in Los Angeles and hated it. In reality, yoga forced her to confront things that she had spent years running from; like the trauma from her childhood that continued into her teen years.

Athena is among the 38% of foster youth in California who are reunited with their birth parents. She is also among the small percentage of foster youth who are reunited but experience a negative reunification.

Despite a tumultuous childhood in foster care and a fractured leg injury in high school, Annika kept pursuing her college dream of going to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on a track scholarship and ultimately made it happen.

To master his passion, Deitrick started his photography education through trial and error. Then, last year, he enrolled in a two-day boot camp hosted by PBS SoCal’s To Foster Change Initiative and the UnScene Photography Tour.