Daequan Marquis McKinney, no relation to Kenyatta, is a student at One Bright Ray who’s struggling with his mother’s illness. He said having a mentor who cared about his life made all the difference.
“At other schools, these teachers don’t even ask us how your day is going. I feel they don’t really care about you,” said McKinney, 18. “But with Sankofa, it’s ‘How is your day going? Can I help you with this?’ You really feel like you have somebody in your corner, you’ve got somebody to talk to.”
This year, several initiatives targeting young men of color have made headlines, including President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, which is aimed at addressing opportunity gaps faced by young black and Latino men.
Nutter is the co-chairman of the U.S Conference of Mayors My Brother’s Keeper Task Force and is also co-founder of Cities United, a partnership whose goal is to curb the violent slayings of black men across the country.
Desmond Baker, a Sankofa facilitator at Randolph Career Academy in Nicetown, said that when Obama first announced his initiative, he showed the announcement on video to his Sankofa students.
“I asked them, ‘So what is this?’ They said, ‘This sound like the program we already a part of,’ ” Baker said. “I swear, someone took binoculars, saw Sankofa and said, ‘This works.’ ”
Sankofa, which debuted in the district in 2011, was receiving $1.2 million a year and was in the second year of a three-year contract when staffers were notified on Aug. 28 that they had a week to pack up.
“I don’t know if they knew about us. That’s the only reason I can think they’d stop a program like this,” Kenyatta McKinney said. “Maybe they just didn’t know the work we were doing.”