President Obama announced Monday that charities and corporations have chipped in $91-million on top of money already pledged to support a White House effort to help young boys and men of color.
Called My Brother’s Keeper, the effort was introduced in February when a group of 29 grant makers pledged $200-million over five years to help young minority males.
Gathered at the White House with superintendents from across the country, Obama said 60 large school systems pledged to develop programs to help minority students from pre-kindergarten through high school. The programs include increasing access to preschool, reducing suspensions and expulsions, getting more federal education aid to students, and increasing the number of advanced courses completed by minority males.
The support for My Brother’s Keeper included $50-million from the Emerson Collective, a charity organization founded by Apple founder Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs and partners from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to devise a competition for new high-school designs.
“Most high schools are built for an economy that has long passed,” said Russlynn Ali, managing director of the collective’s education fund and former assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. “We hope to build high schools that inspire the nation.”
Ms. Ali said the collective will begin designing the contest over the next two months. She declined to say how much of the gift came from the collective and how much from other donors. While the designs will likely include new technologies and coursework in many school districts, Ms. Ali declined to be more specific.
Other pledges:
• The National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Retired Players Association said they will recruit 25,000 mentors with an emphasis on attracting minority men to serve as role models to young boys.
• AT&T said it will give $18-million to support mentoring and other educational efforts geared toward minority males. The company plans to increase employee participation in mentoring programs with a goal of providing 1 million hours of mentoring by the end of 2016.
• Citi Foundation will contribute $10-million, part of a $50-million commitment made in March, to create ServiceWorks, a program that will support 225 AmeriCorps members in certain cities.
• The College Board plans to devote $1.5-million to “All In,” a program that will encourage black, Latino, and Native American students to enroll in advanced-placement courses.
• Discovery Communications will dedicate $1-million to develop programming to combat negative perceptions of young minority men.
• Youth Guidance and Match, two Chicago nonprofits, will use part of $10-million in state and local grants to expand their mentoring and tutoring programs.
Overlooking Girls
Nakisha Lewis, a philanthropy consultant, was one of 1,000 academics, activists, students, and other professionals who signed a letter to President Obama in June urging him to include minority women and girls in the effort.
On Monday she and others used the Twitter hashtag “whywecantwait” to express their frustration with the scope of the effort.
“My Brother’s Keeper will fail if it remains exclusive,” she said in an interview. “It’s extremely disheartening. Women and girls of color are also in need of philanthropic investment and changes in public policy.”
Carmen Rojas, associate director of collective impact at Living Cities, a foundation and bank-funded group that works to help the poor, agreed.
She said the effort could prove to be “transformative” to the lives of many boys and praised foundations for getting involved. But she said the effort runs the risk of stalling if it is not broadened into a larger federal commitment to address racism.
“The struggle of black and Latino boys is often the same struggle black and Latina girls are facing,” she said.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on July 22, 2014, to clarify the grants to Youth Guidance and Match.
