Detroit Leaders Jump To Support 'My Brother's Keeper' Initiative To Help Young Minority Men
DETROIT (WWJ) -- President Barack Obama issued call-to-action earlier this year to help keep young minority males on the right track, and Detroit is stepping up to do its part.
Mayor Mike Duggan joined about 50 other community leaders at Wayne State University on Monday to set the My Brother's Keeper Detroit agenda, targeting young African-American men.
"We're losing too many of them," Duggan said. "It's going to take the entire community to pull together."
The Obama administration began the My Brother's Keeper Initiative in February in response to the growing disparities that young African-American and Latino men face.
Over the summer, Obama issued a playbook that outlined a set of recommendations and steps for implementing the initiative across the country, and he invited mayors to take on the challenge.
"The success of Detroit is directly tied to its young people," Duggan said. "The My Brother's Keeper program is vital, especially in a city like Detroit that is 83 percent African-American."
The Skillman Foundation committed $2 million total in grants to support the My Brother's Keeper work in Detroit. The Skillman Foundation is also making a $750,000 grant to the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, a national program will coordinate efforts in Detroit. The grant, to be paid over two years with $375,000 each in 2015 and 2016, focuses on building local leadership to collaborate on a shared framework to advance the work. Of those funds, $500,000 will be deployed locally to support My Brother's Keeper initiatives and projects on the ground in Detroit.
"We know that this is possible," President and CEO of the Skillman Foundation Tonya Allen said. "We've seen it happen in our neighborhoods, where graduation rates for African-American males have risen 15 percent since 2008."
In the six Skillman Foundation-targeted neighborhoods -- Brightmoor, Chadsey Condon, Cody Rouge, Northend, Osborn and Southwest Detroit -- where multiple agencies have come together to focus on improving outcomes, graduate rates for African-American boys rose 15 percent from 2008 to 2013.
Detroit student Quantavious Zimmerman, 17, said that one of his challenges is being unfairly labeled.
"The community you live in, the school you go to, your area code, everything -- they just stereotype you, they put you in a box, so everybody else assumes you're going to be bad," Zimmerman said.
