Led by Kenyatta Stephens, Kevin Bryant, and Derek Blackmon, the organization invests in mentor models and community building practices that provide positive examples to over 1,720 system-impacted youth and foster connections between stakeholders to create alternative pathways and safer circumstances.
Prior to the pandemic, it used monthly community luncheons across three service delivery areas in the city of Detroit , including schools, as a central strategy for bringing youth, block clubs, police, the mayor’s office, and the broader village into one room for connection and community. Youth would form junior block clubs as vehicles for participation in community gardens and other staple projects. Peace and safety walks would challenge street violence and, in collaboration with area businesses, community institutions, and the Detroit Police Department, established ‘green light zones’ that converted locations of repeated violence into safety zones to ensure neighbors could access schools, gas stations, and other essential services without fear.
With the onset of the pandemic, like so many, Black Family Development took their programming virtual, overcoming the technical challenges, and ensuring that the young men in their programs continued to have a
touch point with positive role models and a support system as they navigated transitions in school, life, and community.
As they encountered the challenges of transitioning to virtual and reformatting their programs, the organization modeled how to maintain motivation through hardship by drawing on staff members’ own family experience, being parents of successful children, as well as the resiliency of their city, rooted in the love they have for where they themselves were raised.
The Harambee Brotherhood Circles retained 40 core youth participants and – despite the Department of Labor designating Detroit an ‘employment desert’ – connected 22 with employment. The virtual space connects youth with mentors who have a ‘holistic and future vision’ for them. Participants are exposed to men from the neighborhood who are now pilots, professionals, elected statesmen, who are giving back. The examples provide models of success that open a sense of opportunity that many youth in the program otherwise are unexposed to. By providing mentors who look like them, the Circle challenges the common notion participants report that, “I didn’t think people made it out of the neighborhood. But now you’re showing me elders who are doing things,” said Program Manager, Derek Blackmon.
