Kansas City group home gives Black boys guidance, not role models who look like them
Boys Hope Girls Hope, a local nonprofit, began with one goal, “to help children break the cycle of poverty by offering them a stable and loving home, guidance, and access to quality education.” That’s the beautiful objective highlighted on the group home’s website.
And it is happening for some Kansas City teens in the Boys Hope program. But these Black boys — and they are all Black — are missing something essential: role models of successful Black men to connect with.
The teen boys who live in the Boys Hope group home away from their urban neighborhoods, schools, friends and families should be able to see and interact with successful Black men in their day-to-day lives. If hope is what the organization truly wants to extend, then it should show the teens what success looks like for men who look like them. There are no girls in the program.
But in the Boys Hope house, which opened in 2006 in an upper-middle-class suburban area on State Line Road, there are no Black men in the house, or in the 501(c)(3) nonprofit’s leadership roles. Nowhere in the house are there images of Black male success, not even in art on the naked walls. It’s a great big house, but not as homey as it could be.
The nonprofit does not have a mentorship program where Black men could volunteer to spend time with the teens. The boys mentor each other. The program director is Black, but she does not live in the house. Two white women do. For all the good the program does, if the teens struggle with racial identity, that’s a problem.
Private school environment for disadvantaged kids
The focus is on academics. This is not a reform school, nor is the program equipped to receive teens with behavior issues. The boys in the program have to pass a test to show they can manage the rigor of a college preparatory school such as Rockhurst High School.
For the most part, the Boys Hope teens have left public schools where most of the students are Black to attend St. Thomas More for middle school, and then Rockhurst, where more than 87% of the students are white. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it can be a big adjustment for the Boys Hope teens. One of them told me it was the first thing he noticed when he got to the school. “There were not a lot of people who looked like me,” he said.
Some of the boys come to the group home as young as 10 and stay through high school. To some degree, the program takes on the responsibility of raising these boys. House parents pick them up from school and sports practices, help with homework and school projects, take them to the doctor and to get haircuts. They arrange times for them to hang with friends outside the house. They feed and clothe them and make sure they complete household chores.
The boys get to visit parents or guardians one weekend a month.
Boys Hope dangles a private school education in front of parents who could never afford the $13,000-a-year private school tuition. For that, they agree to allow their boy to live in the group home year-round. In some cases, the boys come out of homeless environments or homes where parents struggle in a variety of areas, including financially.
“A low-income household, an unsafe neighborhood, a struggling school or any other barrier should not prevent children from honing talents leveraging strengths, realizing dreams, or living out their God-given purpose and potential,” a Boys Hope pamphlet says.
But neither should the teens be stripped of culture. And that’s what is at risk.
African American cultural identity important
I met the boys, and they are great. Some are athletes, while others prefer to spend free time playing video games or digging into their studies. The older boys look after the younger boys, and the younger boys look up to their older housemates.
In an effort to provide some cultural identity for the boys, Boys Hope launched a program that allows scholars to identify needs in the communities they come from, talk about social inequities and do community engagement projects there. That’s not enough.
No way Boys Hope can’t find Black men in Kansas City to pair with these promising teens they call “their scholars.” I could rattle off a handful of suggestions with little thought. Kansas City’s mayor is Black. The superintendent of schools is Black, and there are lots of Black police officers, lawyers, business leaders, pastors and educators, as well as members of Black fraternity groups in the city. There is no excuse.
That this has not already happened at Boys Hope “might lead one to believe it is intentional,” said Shanette Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, who has written extensively about African American identity and the development of Black men, among other issues that influence Black achievement.
“Their whole program is a program of salvation,” Harris said. “But I don’t think they see this missing portion as unhealthy or dysfunctional. They see poor Black communities as a problem, a barrier for the boys, and believe that if they can get them out of there, reduce that Blackness, they will be healthier.” But, she said, without that identity piece, “consciously or unconsciously they are promoting assimilation. Erasing Blackness. And it creates for the boys a Eurocentric racial identity.”
There is a risk, Harris said, of turning out bright young Black men who see “what is Black as bad and white is good.” You see the problem there, right? They themselves are Black.
The boys deserve the best of both worlds — a well-thought-out experience that is a healthy combination of education, relationships and culture.
‘There is an absence of urgency’
Executive Director Tonya Dean, who came to Boys Hope in 2019, agrees and said she has pushed for starting a mentorship initiative for the scholars, but said she’s had little success in getting Boys Hope decision-makers to make this a priority.
“There is not a resistance because they do see the need,” Dean said. “But there is an absence of urgency.”
Dean said she believes the program which is “young for a nonprofit,” can do better. “We have a lot of room to grow,” Dean said, “So many nonprofits start with a hope and a prayer and a vision. I think that every year we are becoming more successful.”
Of the 34 boys who have come into the program over its 15 years, 77% have stayed at least one year and 29% stayed five years or more. In all, 25 of the teens actually got their high school diploma either while they were in the program or after they left it. Three of them have graduated college, two are currently attending college and one is attending a trade school.
Yes, sometimes it does take a village to raise children. So Black men in Kansas City, when Boys Hope comes knocking at your door asking for help, you should say yes. Or better yet, give them a call and volunteer.
