The Brotherhood
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The Brotherhood is a comprehensive rites of passage program, administered over 4-6 years, helping boys to define manhood, leadership and brotherhood and live stable lives.
About You
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Your idea
Year the initative began (yyyy)
1995
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Plot your innovation within the mosaic of solutions
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Culture of no accountability: Neither society nor men at risk act accountable to each other
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Change surrounding cultures to create a society that values and enriches young people’s transition to adulthood
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
We believe in the transforming power of education. We have based our youth development model on the ideal that through exploration, immersion, and exposure, young peoples’ minds can transform and their future possibilities become expanded. Yet our members face daunting obstacles as they seek education. In New York City our children attend crumbling schools that educate only in name.
There are 1.1 million students in the New York City school system, 85% are students of color, and it is the third most segregated school system in the country. 700,000 children are at risk of failure. Low performing schools were found to have half the books of high performing schools, limited art programs, crumbling physical spaces, a dearth of computers, over 30 children to a classroom, and high quality teachers fleeing only to be replaced inexperienced teachers. At many schools a high school diploma represents an 8th grade level education. (Campaign for Fiscal Equity, NYS Court of Appeals, 2003)
Our members are brilliant young people – their minds are filled with intellectual questions, they desire knowledge and possess powerful voices. And yet, for too many of them, they are stifled in school, feeling they are not in a place of learning but instead a holding facility that ill prepares them for society. They achieve, for the most part, not because of the education they receive, but in spite of it.
This is a national problem that needs a national solution – a dedication of political capital, mind power, and a creative new government investment. Providing true educational opportunity, has been proven to be one of the great equalizers to social inequality. Our children can learn if the financial means are directed and the concerted effort is made to do the difficult, but doable work, of transforming educational expectations and resources. If throughout this, the richest nation in the world, money were spent, intelligently, on urban education at the rate that it is spent on our military or on the prison industrial system, transforming change would occur.
Name Your Project
The Brotherhood
Describe Your Idea
The Brotherhood is a comprehensive rites of passage program, administered over 4-6 years, helping boys to define manhood, leadership and brotherhood and live stable lives.
Innovation
Describe your program or new idea in one sentence.
The Brotherhood is a comprehensive rites of passage program, administered over 4-6 years, helping boys to define manhood, leadership and brotherhood and live stable lives.
What makes your initiative uniquely positioned to create change in your community?
Founded in 1995, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol is one of the most unique youth development organizations in the country. We have been recognized as one of the most adept organizations at reaching young men - providing essential guidance toward achievement.
We have been recognized over the last 12 years for providing some of the most innovative and highly successful practices in the nation. We have earned national recognition for our model. We were featured on the Oprah Winfrey show and awarded the Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network Use Your Life Award; awarded the national Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award which recognized us for “outstanding leadership”; received the Fund for the City of New York’s Union Square Award and Special Achievement Award”; been awarded the Abyssinian Development Corporation Harlem Renaissance Award; received Brown University’s inaugural Alumni Association Young Public Service Award; and received the Community Works Long Walk to Freedom Youth Activism Award, recognizing us as “national civil rights leaders of the new millennium.
Describe how you organize and carry out your work?
We create single sex groups, sustained over 4-6 years, Brotherhood chapters, where young men explore critical social issues and new exposure experiences, deconstruct messages about manhood and develop life-long bonds. We help our young men to not merely survive the conditions faced growing up in Harlem and the South Bronx, but to overcome these realities and excel. They attend wilderness retreats and international study programs to Africa and Latin America, receive job placement, intensive mentorship, college guidance and family and school support.
What is your plan to scale and expand your innovation into your community and beyond?
Through Liberating Voices/Liberating Minds we publish our members’ writings and our curriculum and conduct professional development on our youth development model for community and school educators. We’ve trained over 100 educators to use our approaches in Berkeley, Bermuda, Raleigh-Durham, New York, Chicago, and at two schools in the South Bronx; and we are planning more this year. The central document for these trainings is our curriculum, Brother, Sister, Leader: The Official Curriculum of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol. The Market Director and Co-Founder of The North East Foundation for Children is assisting us in marketing these books and ensuring wide distribution.
In Bermuda we trained a group that has taken the name, Bermuda Brotherhood, and was created to respond to what has been deemed an explosion of violence on the island among young men. We connected this group to a 400K grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies, and they hired one of our youth founding members and alumni (Brown University, '07) as one of their youth workers
What other resources, institutional, or policy needs would be necessary to help sustain and scale up your idea?
The resource we need to sustain and scale up our organization is funding - both programmatic and capital.
In 2007 we purchased the land adjacent to our existing building. In our present site we have maximized the usage of every square inch within our building. We have no space for expansion of staff or youth services. The new structure will provide classrooms, expanded performance and recreational space, staff offices, improved technology center, and a variety of other resources, allowing us to service a greater number of members, to service our existing members more comprehensively and to be a place where community meetings, performances and trainings can occur. We envision a green building, built according to prevailing environmental standards, and one that incorporates into its vision the adjacent Green Thumb community garden that is being transformed into an environmental education center, botany space, and play area.
We need capital dollars for this project, we also support to sustain our programming and extend our national trainings.
Impact
Describe your impact in one sentence, commenting on both the individual and community levels.
The Brotherhood program has helped guide our young men on the the path toward manhood - helping them to choose to live conscious lives.
What impact has your work achieved to date?
Our alumni outcomes are documented: 93% have graduated from high school or received their GEDs with 85% graduated from high school, 85% were accepted to college, 91% are working full time or enrolled in college, none are incarcerated, 97% have not had a child before graduating from high school, and 98% of our male alumni under 21 do not have a child.
Oprah Winfrey: "The Brotherhood/Sister Sol is using their passion to uplift and inspire a next generation though our extraordinary work that creates leaders and a sanctuary for children where they can develop a higher vision for themselves."
Congressman Charles B. Rangel: “They play a critically important role working with the youth who are most at risk."
Danny Glover: “What brought me to The Brotherhood/Sister Sol is that this organization is attempting to find relevant solutions to the desperate situations facing our young people in this community. The services they provide are invaluable. They are a significant island in a vast sea.”
Number of individuals served
We serve over 200 young people a year though out direct services and trained 100 educators to service thousands more:
"Before The Brotherhood stepped on the scene I was affiliated with a lot of negative activity due to my surroundings. What makes The Brotherhood special and unique to me is the great amount of respect and love that was given to us from day one. We are told where we stand as individuals in this society. The Brotherhood seeks to first create trust and unity among the brothers, then to educate us in various areas, and then to help us to pass on what we know to those who do not know. As young men in a society where a father figure is a rarity, it is our duty to the next generation to seek enlightenment, spread knowledge, and create stronger ties within our communities. The Brotherhood is more than just a boys club, it’s more like a family that lifts brothers up while climbing."
Juan
Community impact
Students from the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at The New School documented a massive community social rate of return due to our program. Concerning our alumni: 93% have graduated from high school or received their GEDs with 85% graduating from high school, 85% were accepted to college, 91% are working full time or enrolled in college, none are incarcerated, 97% have not had a child before graduating from high school, and 98% of our male alumni under 21 do not have children. When compared with Citywide statistics (49% of all Black men in New York City being unemployed, 24% of Black males graduating from high school in four years) the social rate of return reflected in not having to spend tax payer dollars on youth incarceration, the socio-economic results of lower teenage pregnancy, less educational failure, not having to support our members at the same rate as their peers with social program capital, saves the community over 15 million dollars a decade.
Society at large
We often say that young people are the most often discussed, least heard from constituency in America. We believe in providing our members with the space to speak on panels, to represent their viewpoints and to have their words published. We have published three volumes of their words: The Brotherhood Speaks, Voices of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol and Off The Subject: The Words of Lyrical Circle. These volumes, and the statistical outcomes already sited, display a profound effect on society.
What measure do you use to gauge your impact and why?
93% have graduated from high school or received their GEDs with 85% graduated from high school, 85% were accepted to college, 91% are working full time or enrolled in college, none are incarcerated, 97% have not had a child before graduating from high school, and 98% of our male alumni under 21 do not have a child - we use these measures because they display positive critical decision making. The choices our members make, when young, effect the entire lives.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative currently being financed and how would you finance further expansion and/or replication?
In August 2006, we partnered with The Whelan Group, a strategic advisory firm to nonprofits, to develop a plan for long-term institutional growth and financial stability. We developed a comprehensive plan, which included a fundraising assessment, a voluntary leadership development strategy, five-year financial projections, tactical strategies needed to strengthen and enhance fundraising capability, engage supporters, broaden our financial support base, build institutional capacity, as well as to prepare the organization for its upcoming capital campaign. We seek to continue our 12 years of success in obtaining foundation support and to build on our large national funders; to increase individual donors through special events; to obtain earned income via our book sales and Liberating Voice/Liberating Minds trainings; and to obtain government funding.
Provide information on your current finances and organization:
Our budget for this fiscal year is 1.6 million dollars. We have 15 full time staff and assorted pier-diem and part time support staff that include instructors and tutors and depends on the seasonal activities. We have 15 regular volunteers.
Our present major funders include, Charles Hayden Foundation, Citi, Clark Foundation, Deutsche Bank, Douglas B. Gardner Foundation, Depart of Youth and Community Development, Elton John Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York City Council Member Robert Jackson, Levitt Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation New York Foundation, New York Women’s Foundation, Reginald Lewis Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisers, Scherman Foundation, Shippy Foundation, St. James Church, Surdna Foundation, Theodore Luce Charitable Trust, Tiger Foundation, Twenty-First Century Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Our revenue last fiscal year was 1.4 million dollars. 78% was from Foundations; 10% from special events; 8% from individuals; 3% from government; 1% fee for service. This year we expect to greatly raise the percentage from special events and from government sources.
Who are your potential partners and allies?
Our potential allies and partners are other colleague organizations that do similar work - (i.e) Omega Boys Club, Mentoring Society, Ella Baker Center. We are a part of a national convening of the critical issues facing Black men and boys, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and tTwenty-First Century Foundation, consists of practitioners, researchers and funders from around the country who are working on this issue. We have been consistently highlighted and our work is featured on the website under best national practices.
Who are your potential investors?
Over 100 foundations and corporations have supported our work since our inception. Our present and historical funders include Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Arthur M. Blank Foundation, Charles Hayden Foundation, Clark Foundation, Tiger Foundation, Compton Foundation, Levitt Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York Foundation, Pinkerton Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors, Tides Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Taconic Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, Amalgamated Bank, Citigroup Foundation, Louis Dreyfus Corporation, St. Paul Companies, the City of New York, assorted elected officials, and over 1,000 individuals
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
Khary Lazarre-White and Jason Warwin grew up together in New York City. Reared in families committed to social change, vested in movements that ranged from the Civil Rights Movement to the Women's Movement, from the Labor Movement to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, they grew up committed to seeking to create a more equitable world. They attended elementary school together at PS 75 and then Brown University together, and while seniors they created The Brotherhood in Providence, RI in 1994.
In 1995, the brought the program back to Harlem, incorporating the organization and beginning their work at Jason's high school alma mater in East Harlem. They recognized the obstacles young men face growing up in poverty, and they believed that the creation of a strong, supportive community could help youth overcome the challenges of circumstance and succeed in life. For three years the program served solely young men. In 1998, Dr. Susan Wilcox came on board as a third Co-Director, joining Jason and Khary in the Directors Circle (the leadership team which provides our organizational vision and echoes the organization’s core ideals: community, collaboration and equity). Under Susan’s guidance, the organization expanded to include programs for young women and was renamed The Brotherhood/Sister Sol. In December 1999, the organization purchased and renovated a Harlem brownstone, which still serves as headquarters. In March of 2007 they purchased the land adjacent to our building and now control 5 lots in West Harlem - the leading youth serving agency in the community.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material.
Khary received his B.A. from Brown University with honors in Africana Studies, and his J.D. from the Yale Law School. In 1995 Khary Co-Founded The Brotherhood/Sister Sol. Khary edited The Brotherhood Speaks (1997), Voices of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (2003), and Off the Subject: The Words of Lyrical Circle of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (2006) and had published essays that include in Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books, 2005), One in a Million (Essence Magazine, 1995), and Preparing Youth for Social Change (AfterSchool Matters, 2004).
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| Brotherhood Overview.pdf | 710.48 KB |
 | The Brotherhood has been chosen as a finalist in Young Men at Risk: Transforming the Power of a Generation. - 1439 days ago |
