Forward Promise: Empowerment Projects [RWJF.org]

Forward Promise aims to promote opportunities for boys and young men of color (BYMOC) to heal, grow, and thrive in the face of chronic stress and trauma. Empowerment Projects seek to strengthen organizations that provide culturally relevant healing responses to trauma, and can partner with the youth-serving systems that touch BYMOC to advance new practices to prevent further traumatization. In doing so, it is important that the organizations use the stories of BYMOC’s resilience and healing to promote and inform their work, and that BYMOC themselves are the ones telling those stories. Forward Promise seeks to elevate the promising practices of Empowerment Projects grantees to advance a greater understanding of what it means for BYMOC to heal, grow, and thrive. Equipped with this understanding, we hope that other youth-serving organizations and systems can then identify and modify their policies and practices that, intentionally or not, serve as barriers to the health and success of BYMOC.