For the Love of Baltimore
I Am MENtality is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization missioned to develop the next generation’s leaders by offering educational and experimental opportunities. We first wrote about I Am MENtality as schools considered reopening plans last summer. This January, we reconnected to discuss their five year anniversary. I Am MENtality’s Executive Director, Darren Rogers, shared the rich story of their origins and journey, building trust with youth, the era of the recently-established Baltimore Legacy Builders Collective and more.
The year is 1988: Darren Rogers is 6 years old and attends William Paca Elementary School, which happens to be the closest playground to his East Baltimore home. Other days, Darren and his friends play football in the streets, making throws at one another with rocks in the absence of proper equipment.
“My childhood probably wasn’t the best for what I understand now toward building healthy children, but it was fun. We made the best of it,” Darren reflects.
Other playgrounds and green spaces were few and far between, much less programs and opportunities to grow as individuals. The next recreation center was also 5 to 6 blocks away from their homes, which Darren emphasizes is “a huge distance when you’re young and your family’s main focus is ensuring safety from violence, the drug trade, and other dangers within the community. Anyone who grew up in these communities were aware of the imaginary lines that you were not to transgress your neighborhood.”
It wasn’t until Darren’s first daughter, Laila, was born that he began processing the impact of limited growth opportunities and tools needed to lead a child’s life. These repercussions also showed up with youth he later supported day-to-day through leadership development training and mental health. Subsequently, questions concerning how to provide quality opportunities for young men began centering Darren’s lifework:
He increasingly contemplated, “Where does a young man go if he’s not into sports, but he wants to be a leader? Where do you go if you have relational challenges in your home?”
Nowadays, Darren is the Executive Director at I Am MENtality, “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization missioned to develop the next generation’s leaders.” The I Am MENtality team, currently consisting of 3 staff members and 21 volunteers, do so by offering their flagship Leadership Academy. Through this program, the team facilitates courses on topics including financial literacy, conflict resolution, relationship-building and more.
Mentor-mentee relationships don’t begin to flourish until there’s trust
Initially, the organization’s intent was to support young men in building relationships as a foundation for success in all domains of life. In January 2016, the first cohort of 22 young men — one of which made weekly drives with his parents from Pennsylvania to stay connected — gathered for the first time at the Shake & Bake Family Fun Center in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.
He admits that despite feeling strongly about the need for a quality youth male development program in Baltimore, Darren wasn’t sure if the young men would be able to absorb any leadership training. He thought back to his own upbringing, as the first-born child to a fourteen-year-old mother and a sixteen-year-old father, as well as the other “extreme norms” he experienced firsthand and witnessed in his community.
“The average seven-year-old living in the communities I come from is in survival mode, faced with or going through some traumatic experiences. Thinking on a day-to-day basis, they might not necessarily be thinking long-term or be interested in learning financial literacy,” Darren contextualizes. The early days of I Am MENtality therefore necessitated that the team build their internal capacity to develop trust with youth. Darren says that it’s not uncommon for them to come to the program feeling wary of mentorship, having grown accustomed to inconsistent support systems in their lives.
This time last year, the I Am MENtality team intended on expanding contractual programming in at least seven schools across North, East and South Baltimore. Other priorities included refining data collection methods, and growing their community engagement and fundraising efforts. But as a result of COVID-19, their focus quickly shifted to ensuring students had access to technology and quality work spaces.
The team was able to pivot online within the first week of school closures, and by the end of 2020, they had engaged in 800+ hours of virtual programming with youth. This was on top of the 100+ hours in the community through food distributions, neighborhood cleanups and more.
At the same time, a new partnership — first formed with the support of the T. Rowe Price Foundation at the end of 2019 — began to crystallize. Officially launched in October 2020, The Baltimore Legacy Builders Collective currently consists of I Am MENtality, B-360, and The Be. Org. They all share a Chief Development Officer that assists with their mutual scaling and sustainability goals in the city.
Additionally, a team of community junior and senior level advisors working across multiple sectors and institutions help advance their collective growth. Although this partnership will begin as a three-year commitment, Darren says that the goal is “to be able to provide the same resources and pay it forward to other black-led organizations to continue future collaborations.” And so far, Darren says this partnership has already transformed the way he works.
“We’re able to balance out the challenges we all face, support each other, and speak to the work that we each do. I love this partnership [model] because I’m not interested in doing this work alone. We all understand the value of strategic partnership and want to make a huge impact on the way organizations locally and nationally partner. We’re also aware that our success is uncommon and necessitates creating pathways for other black-led organizations to thrive.”
Now that I Am MENtality youth have technology for virtual learning, Darren says the organizational focus this year is “to reinvest and reposition youth for transformation,” especially with their health and wellness. The degree to which students succeed is intrinsically intertwined with their parents’ wellbeing, and so they aim to expand their mental health support to parents this year too. Over time, these investments will continue to nurture more stories of transformation in young men’s lives across the city.
“That’s what we want for our young men. We can never forget about their potential and their future,” Darren emphasizes.
I finish up by asking Darren to reflect on his feelings about I Am MENtality’s fifth anniversary, to which he says he “feels accomplished and happy with the work they have done as a team.” “Honestly, where we are now wasn’t our initial thought ,” Darren says as he smiles. “The dream was to provide a small group of young people some tools to help them level up, but now we’re here, and it’s amazing. It’s been a great ride.”
Darren contributes his success thus far in journey to his faith in God, the I Am MENtality family, and the community of supporters locally and nationally.
How can you support?
I Am MENtality typically celebrates each additional year in operation with an anniversary event. This year, the team will launch their “For the Love of Baltimore” campaign to raise $30K and continue supporting youth through their programs. These funds will go directly to repositioning youth for success. The plan is to focus on their health and wellness, in addition to adding tutoring and other academic supports to ensure that they are supported with their academic goals.
The campaign will run from Monday, February 1, 2021 through Sunday, February 14, 2021. Learn more information and consider contributing to grow the next generation of Baltimore’s leaders: I AM MENtality Youth Male Empowerment Project via Kindful
Want to read more?
Viewpoint: Black-led nonprofits need your committed support to make change | Read this recent op-ed by Brittany Young, Tonee Lawson and Darren Rogers in the Baltimore Businesss Journal.
Check out the member thought piece featuring I AM MENtality here and the op-ed adaptation for Technical.ly Baltimore here.
