I met Barry in the dark days of COVID, when New York City's physical, mental, and economic health were being hammered and gun violence had surged to levels not seen in decades. Born and raised in Bed Stuy, Barry had spent the past fifteen years in public education, the correctional systems, and community organizing, always focusing on supporting boys and young men of color. He'd been Dean of Culture at Eagle Academy (a network of innovative all boys public high schools), taught in the CUNY Fatherhood Academy, and led mentorship programs for young men held in the gang units at the Rikers Island correctional complex.

Barry called his new organization The B.R.O. Experience Foundation – the letters standing for Brothers Redefining Opportunity. The program portfolio started with a free elementary-age summer camp and grew to include a four-year Rites of Passage high school program, a hip hop group therapy curriculum, a nine-month cohort for justice-impacted young men disconnected from school and community, and a fatherhood program supporting young dads. In 2023, we opened The BRO Space, a 4,500 square foot community wellness center in the heart of Bed Stuy where we have a computer lab and run recurring programming and a full schedule of events including film screenings, panels, policy conversations, an annual mental health summit, and our Extraordinary Men Awards gala. And in 2025 we proudly launched BeWellBro.org, an online mental health hub for youth, featuring BIPOC experts alongside the voices of young people themselves.

The target impacts of B.R.O. are improved mental health and happiness, stronger reading and literacy skills (especially among our 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders), lower risk of violence involvement, lower interaction with the justice system, increased community engagement, and increased economic prospects.

All of this immensely uplifting work draws on the power of culturally-aligned Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Social Emotional Learning (SEL), transformational mentoring, mindfulness and embodiment, and critical consciousness skills that help young people understand and navigate the systems that exist around them.

The backdrop for this mission is urgent – Black boys in the US are born into a grim kaleidoscope of threats and systemic inequities. They face worse odds than their white peers in nearly every category and are increasingly trailing behind their Black female peers in many concerning ways, including test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment, and earnings.

Violence continues to be devastating in Black communities, and homicide is the leading killer of young Black men (a rate nearly twenty times higher than for white males of the same age), a tragic pattern that ravages victims and perpetrators, families and friends, and spreads waves of fear and psychological destabilization to entire neighborhoods and communities.

Suicide rates among Black youth have risen faster than in any other racial group in the past twenty years, and the suicide rate for young Black males has surged by 60%. This makes suicide the third leading cause of death for male Black youth – twice the rate of white youth, and 2.5 times higher than Black girls the same age. But still only one in three Black American who needs mental health support receives it, trailing far behind white Americans.

Even if they weren't bearing some of the worst of the youth mental health crisis, young Black men are thrust into a society riddled with inhumane policing and profiling, wildly disproportionate incarceration rates, a homeless population that is 38% Black (despite the nation being 13% Black), and an economic playing field where 1 in 4 Black households have zero or negative wealth (compared to 1 in 12 white households). 

A 2023 study in JAMA distills the toll of these inequities into tragically vivid numbers: in the 22 years between 1999 to 2020, "the Black population in the US experienced more than 1.63 million excess deaths and more than 80 million excess years of life lost when compared with the White population." 80 million years.

We see these years of life evaporate each time a Black person falls to preventable disease, is disproportionately hit by COVID, suffers an overdose, a suicide, or is struck down by violence. In our B.R.O. community, a young life was pulled away from us in 2024. Brandon Dubois, 24 years old, had just completed the pilot program of our new BRO Project. Three days after accepting his certificate he was shot and killed near his home in Brooklyn. Despite difficulties in his life, Brandon had been learning to be more open with his peers and had excelled at creative expression during the 5 months he was in our program. The years of life that he could have lived can never be reclaimed.

There are many ways to work towards righting these wrongs, and the work cannot stop, even in the face of dismantlement from the highest levels of our government. I've been so greatly inspired by what I've seen in the work of Brothers Redefining Opportunity because it dares to operate on such deep levels of the human being. The theory of change posits that inner development builds inner strength, and inner strength is the foundation for inner and outer growth, greater resilience to adversity, greater community connectivity, and more inspiration to drive change.

Bringing this work to young men of color from poor households is a bold way to push for positive change. But this is also the kind of work that each of us should be committed to realizing in our own lives. We all need inner development, inner strength, community connectivity, and the inspiration to drive change. May we all be good siblings to one another, and may we all define what true opportunity means in this life.