LA2050 is an initiative designed to stimulate an outbreak of idealism that strengthens civic engagement, challenges the status quo, and demands more for the future of Los Angeles. LA2050 engaged the public to establish five visionary goals: to make Los Angeles the best place to learn, create, play, connect, and live by the year 2050.
LA2050 makes investments of financial capital via the My LA2050 Grants Challenge that support organizations positively impacting the five goals and their metrics. We deploy human capital through partnerships to test strategies, bring success to scale, and unite people with solutions. We utilize social capital through community events and digital activations that connect Angelenos, promote equity, and engage the civic community in storytelling.
We believe in the power of Angelenos to shape the future of our region and aim to ignite the creativity and passion of Angelenos to make LA's story one of hope for all.
To help Angelenos develop solutions for their shared future, LA2050 launched the $1 million My LA2050 Grants Challenge. We commenced the latest round of the challenge on September 8, 2015, and announced the winners on December 8, 2015.
Using an online platform to crowdsource ideas and enable crowd voting, we granted ten $100,000 awards to organizations across Los Angeles County to implement their ideas around building a better LA. By crowdsourcing our grantmaking, we opened the process to Angelenos from across the county and promoted participation through social media outreach, live events, and creative advertising. The grants challenge has resulted in an unprecedented grassroots visioning process in Los Angeles–one that has energized hundreds of thousands of Angelenos around exciting possibilities for their future.
LA2050 capitalized on our new media strengths, focusing primarily on Twitter outreach to promote My LA2050 to our 25,000+ followers. In order to broaden our reach, we used Facebook and Twitter ads, partnered with local public radio for radio spots and deployed bus and rail ads for four weeks, resulting in an estimated 7.3 million impressions throughout the region (Supplemental Document: Media). LA2050 has utilized bold branding that is recognized throughout the LA social impact sphere, and that has set the initiative apart from other civic efforts.
While our initiative's promotional campaigns made a splash themselves, the grants challenge created an added value for organizations that applied. Organizations of all sizes had to launch their own communications efforts to garner votes for their proposals, and in turn, developed both physical and digital strategies to generate votes. In some cases, Hollywood tastemakers amplified messages beyond usual supporters (Supplemental Document: Media). My LA2050 unleashed viral outreach and exponentially broadened the impact of LA2050's goals for the future, all with the mighty work of two dedicated Goldhirsh Foundation staff members (Supplemental Document: Impact Report + Submissions Report).
The 2015 My LA2050 Grants Challenge resulted in 302 innovative submissions to build a better Los Angeles and over 70,000 voters. There were nearly 30 million impressions on Twitter, 870,000 views on the My LA2050 page, and 28,000 new newsletter subscriptions.
The ten incredible organizations that won were chosen by the public and our jury, and address issues ranging from advocating for LA's foster youth (CASA) to expanding LA's first public all-girls STEM school (GALA).
In the few short years since we launched the My LA2050 Grants Challenge, our LA2050 community has converged around the optimism and tangible opportunity to create a better Los Angeles for the future. Tens of thousands of Angelenos have contributed to the development of a shared vision culminating in the five inspiring goals. The unprecedented participation through our challenge, both online and off, accelerates our impact, ensures that progress is broadly shared among all Angelenos, and truly celebrates an improved Los Angeles that we are creating together.
