Expand your village; get support for your young male warrior!

BMDS 2014 my son (l) James and his cousin, Hammad.

I grew up with three brothers so I admire and understand men more than many friends of mine who didn’t grow up with brothers.  But as much insight I may have into them, I am not a man and cannot provide my son with all of the tools he needs to thrive in school, in the community and in social media. My son’s father is not as knowledgeable , so I search for outlets and resources for my soon to be teenager so that he can get the support he needs as he begins to navigate through this maze of  hormones, peer pressure and girls!

Thank goodness I came across the Black Male Development Symposium. I believe I read about it on someone’s Facebook post and was intrigued. I visited the website and immediately got excited about all of the different workshops that they offered. For an extremely low price (and some attended for free if they were members of a community-based tutoring or development program), your son is able to attend a full day of workshops AND receive lunch! There were close to 400 young black men in attendance from middle school through college age, and extremely popular concurrent workshops for parents. The unconventional workshop subjects for the young men ranged from learning to play the drum  and navigating rap music lyrics to  managing social media, creating your own black superhero, creating your own comic strip and what to say and what not to say if you were stopped by the police. There were also the typical workshops geared towards college preparation and navigating the college campus as well as peer pressure and bullying in middle school.

I was so impressed with the quality of the information provided as well as the experienced workshop presenters and I am already looking forward to going next year and getting someone to take care of my daughter so that I can attend the parent workshops! My brother facilitated a workshop on Mothers raising boys, and there were other workshops to help with college applications and educating parents on the safety of the social media sites that are popular with our youth. Even if my son’s father were more involved, I would still have urged him to attend this symposium. I try to allow him to make his own decisions, since he is twelve so I showed him the website and let him have the final say (even though I had already signed him up!) He did have a baseball game and Mandarin Chinese class the same day as the Symposium, but he chose to forgo his normal Saturday activities and I supported his decision. And as one friend reminded me, “this happens only once a year.”

The organizers have posted a few pictures and videos from this year’s Symposium and plan to post more so I would visit their website  www.blackmaledevelopment.com or their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BlackMaleDevelopment to get an idea of the quantity and quality of information available. My son is still talking about it.

Hope to see you there next year!