Bed Stuy’s B.R.O. Experience Nets $300,000 in Prizes to Mentor Young Black Men

In an era where many young men of colour in New York risk falling through widening social cracks, an energetic Brooklyn initiative signals how homegrown leadership can quietly mend the city’s fraying social fabric.

On a weekday afternoon in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the thrum of the city pauses briefly inside a 4,500-square-foot sanctuary at 7 Marcus Garvey Boulevard. Here, instead of sirens or raised voices, one hears chess pieces clack and young men debate the merits of stoicism or emotional regulation. This is not a new spin on the YMCA, but the headquarters of The B.R.O. Experience Foundation, an upstart non-profit that sets out to do for Brooklyn’s Black and Brown boys what borough agencies, schools—and sometimes even families—often cannot: provide space for healing, direction, and ambition.

The news is, somewhat surprisingly, philanthropic. In May, Barry Cooper—known as “Coach Coop” and the B.R.O. Experience’s indefatigable founder—won both the 2025 David Prize ($200,000) and the 2026 Brooklyn Org Spark Prize ($100,000). Such funding, rare for grassroots organisations and rarer still for life coaches outside the city’s white-collar enclaves, will expand a six-year-old experiment in Brooklyn community-building that has already touched over 1,000 lives.

This is not the usual story of a do-gooder foundation parachuting into the city’s neediest corners. The B.R.O. Experience is run by, and largely for, those who have grown up negotiating the sometimes-harsh realities of central Brooklyn. Before founding the group, Mr Cooper was a Bed-Stuy barbershop owner, local school dean, and vice-chair of the Brooklyn NAACP’s education committee. “We wanted a safe space—both mentally and physically—for young men to talk, regroup, even eat,” says Cooper, whose lived experience shapes every program.

The offerings mix the practical with the therapeutic. There is the B.R.O. Project, a 10-month “rites of passage” course targeted at 18-to-24-year-old men disconnected from school or work. The curriculum, unsentimental but nurturing, draws from cognitive-behavioural therapy and critical consciousness models. Attendees discuss vulnerability alongside job-readiness, resilience as much as resumes. There are video games and snack bars, but also workshops on managing trauma and building routines. As seeds of support and accountability take root, the hope is that new forms of leadership, attuned to need rather than notoriety, will sprout.

The implications for the city are non-trivial. New York has long struggled to serve its marginalized youth; dropout rates for Black and Latino men still outpace city averages, and a 2023 report by the Department of Youth and Community Development found one in five young men of colour citywide is “disconnected”—out of school and out of work. The direct cost to the city in lost productivity and social services stretches into the hundreds of millions annually. Programs such as the B.R.O. Experience, if they scale, could offer a modest but welcome counterpoint to punitive policing and bureaucratic slog.

Yet, the promise of such ventures—modest in scale, certainly, yet potent in ambition—extends beyond local bookkeeping. By focusing on emotional literacy and practical support, not just academic or criminal-justice intervention, the B.R.O. Experience gambles that social capital built in Bedford-Stuyvesant will ripple into broader civic health. Indeed, Mr Cooper’s foundation has hired 19 staff and built a network that quietly partners with public schools, city agencies, and other nonprofits—a web that bodes well for collective urban resilience.

Crucially, the model eschews celebrity-driven “mentoring” or top-down, policy-wonk fixes. Instead, it prizes small, reproducible interventions and relationships. These, urban theorists reckon, are key to enduring impact in labyrinthine cities like New York. The money backing Mr Cooper’s work, while paltry compared to city contracts for every-police initiatives, signals institutional readiness to endorse models designed from within rather than imposed from above.

Scaling community capital

Still, the obstacles remain formidable. New York’s nonprofit sector is notoriously fragmented, with grants often splintered across hundreds of programs that compete rather than collaborate. The B.R.O. Experience’s own trajectory—buoyant now, but only a few million dollars tall—illustrates the challenge. Most foundations still prefer to invest in education outcomes that can be measured in test scores or employment figures, not harder-to-quantify social trust or personal transformation.

Nationally, programs aimed at young men of colour have a chequered record. My Brother’s Keeper, President Obama’s signature initiative, won headlines but few sustained resources. Chicago’s Becoming a Man, a rare counterexample, showed that group therapy mingled with life skills can cut crime and boost graduation rates. But scale remains elusive: America’s urban problems are gargantuan, and most private funding barely splashes the surface of structural inequity. The B.R.O. Experience does not pretend to be a panacea. Still, as researchers in adolescent psychology note, even “puny” supports—if constant and credible—outperform grand reforms which come and go with political fashion.

Brooklyn itself is a telling case. Once synonymous with urban decay and crime, its gentrifying precincts now co-exist—often uneasily—with pockets of deep disadvantage. In this context, small safe spaces such as Mr Cooper’s offer what sociologists call “third places”: bridges between home, work, and the street. They are the city’s unheralded glue, knitting together what ails have pulled apart. It is too early to declare them an answer to economic displacement or policing excess. But New York, we suspect, would be less vibrant, and more brittle, without them.

One might wish a city as rich and creative as New York did not have to rely on the passion and patchwork ingenuity of its residents to repair holes in its own safety net. Still, for now, it is the Barry Coopers of the world who remind us that, even amid civic ennui, the prospect of a more integrated—and more hopeful—city endures. In a metropolis sometimes dazzled by scale, it is often the smallest experiments, stubbornly local, that signal the way forward. ■