Promise of Place: Building Beloved Communities for Black Men and Boys is the name of a report released last week by the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, or CBMA.
The report scores 50 cities according to their promise in helping Black men and boys succeed and also offers actions steps that may be taken in the future to help ensure their success.
Promise of Place also looks at engagement from a philanthropic standpoint and the development of various organizational structures in cities.
Though not every city featured in the report has shown progress, none have gone backwards.
Ricky Smith, OPS School Board Member and My Brother’s Keeper partner, talks about what makes a successful city for Black male achievement.
"Just knowing there’s a collaborative going on and being able to work with the different entities to identify and know what those gaps are, we can feel this is been an active collaborative. We’ve worked to identify our populations. We know as stakeholders how we can actually serve as a resource. And so there’s actually moving parts that we have and it’s being implemented throughout the city.”
Former President Barack Obama launched My Brother’s Keeper in February 2014 to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color.
To scale and sustain its mission, the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance was launched as a private sector entity in 2015.
To view information on the 50 cities in the report, including Omaha, the website is BlackMaleAchievement.org.