CIS Mentors - the Brother To Brother Program

A few weeks ago at our After Work Social, we had a chance to meet some impressive young men who are benefiting from Communities In Schools of Durham - and turning right around and giving back.  This story comes to us thanks the their mentor, Communities In Schools of Durham Graduation Coach Antonio King.

At Fayetteville Street Elementary School, high-school and elementary school students bunch together in the back of the auditorium to exchange handshakes, back slaps, and other greetings. The growing group of boys and young men talk and joke together quietly as set-up continues in front of the stage: a projector screen, long table, breakfast sandwiches, and juice.

This is how Brother To Brother’s monthly mentoring breakfast begins, a session built on individual relationships - connections between those who’ve walked in the same shoes.

“I feel like this is a way to give back to the community,” says Adrian Dorsey, 17, a Hillside High School senior who participates in the monthly program. “I want these young men to know that there are older kids doing what they’re supposed to do in the classroom.

“I’m helping out someone who’s younger than me, to see something positive ahead of them,” he continues passionately. “A lot of kids, especially in Durham - they don’t get a chance to see that. This gives me a chance to be of service to them.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqbMOuB0DD8

Dorsey is one of a dozen members of Hillside High School’s Hornets football team who’ve joined with a handful of other professional and retired men from Durham’s community to volunteer in the Brother To Brother program at Fayetteville Street Elementary. For Communities In Schools of Durham Graduation Coach Antonio King, also the Hornets’ football coach, the program has been a chance to connect his players with fourth- and fifth-grade boys who look up to them and teach students how to give back. “I think we’re missing that component in education,” King says as he surveys the students in the auditorium.

It’s a focus that works well with the mission and strategic goals of CIS of Durham, where the Board of Directors and staff members have discussed the importance of not only involving the community in Durham Public Schools but encouraging students to grow into engaged members of their communities.

For the Hillside students in the Brother To Brother program, this includes mentoring sessions on the last Tuesday of each month, when they drive up Fayetteville Street to the elementary school to meet and talk with boys in the fourth and fifth grades at the school. Fayetteville Street Elementary Principal, Arrica Dubose, estimates 90 percent of the school’s fourth- and fifth-grade boys participate in the program. Girls participate in the similar Sister To Sister program.  Much of the program focuses on discussing and developing character strengths, social and emotional skills, and academics.

In February, the group discussed black history topics like the Harlem Renaissance, Durham’s Black Wall Street, and the civil rights movement, including discussion of national sit-ins sparked close to home by students in Greensboro and North Carolina Central University who participated in historic civil rights events in Durham.  Naszir Forte-Ferguson, one of the Hillside students in the Brother To Brother program, shared with the group his experience of a recent field trip taken by a group from the high school to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro.

“They look at these older students, at these adults, and they say, ‘That could be me,’” DuBose says. “They say, ‘I want to grow up to be a football player. I want to grow up to go to college. I want to grow up to be a professional.’ And these mentors show them what they have to do, to reach these goals.”