About Us

Our Core Values

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Our Vision

We strive for a future where adolescents have the support, resources, and confidence to build their most brilliant futures.

Who We Are

youthink brings together a unique blend of expertise across Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA):

  • Led by the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine, our team of clinical, behavioral, and community-based health professionals work directly with young people ages 12-25 to make sure they have the resources to thrive, while our training and capacity building team works at a national scale to provide education, best practices, and hands-on support to schools, community-based organizations, and other partners meeting the everchanging needs of adolescents and young adults.
  • In partnership with the Innovation Studio, which inspires, incubates, and accelerates innovative processes and technologies that improve the health of patients and their families. This includes many programs focused on care model innovation, clinical education and simulation, connected care, and accelerators like KidsX.

Our Guiding Principles

At youthink, we:

  • Center new, non-traditional, diverse, and marginalized voices, identities, and experiences.
  • Embrace multidimensional approaches to adolescent sexual and reproductive health, including those that champion family planning, sex positivity, and reproductive justice.
  • View failure as an essential part of learning and the freedom to always re-examine our decisions and change our minds.
  • Maintain open communication, foster collaboration, and value transparency with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Build processes, environments, and innovations that are age-appropriate, medically accurate, culturally and linguistically responsive, and trauma-informed.
  • Facilitate with humility, and honor lived experience as expertise.
  • Embed equitable and participatory design into every stage of the innovation lifecycle.
  • Recognize previous and existing harms that exist in the adolescent sexual and reproductive health fields.
  • Consider the potential unintended consequences of our efforts.
  • Commit to creative risk-taking and being brave, curious, and openminded.