Brothers Helping Brothers To Succeed In College And Beyond

Dariel Vazquez was born in Harlem, New York. Out of all his friends, he was the only one who went to college. As a first-generation, Afro-Latino student, Vazquez felt out of place and socially isolated upon arrival in 2013 at Bard College. He had a hard time fitting in and connecting with others on campus. After a few conversations with his college peers, he realized that he was not the only one feeling this way. At the time, he didn’t have the language for it, but in hindsight he realizes that he, and his peers were suffering from anxiety and depression due to feeling like outsiders.

Looking back, Vazquez stated, “I went through so much just to get to college. It was heartbreaking going through that experience during my first year and saying, “How am I letting this break me?” or “What’s wrong with me that I can’t just get through this?” That was something I later realized wasn’t an experience unique to just me. A lot of us were feeling like that, blaming ourselves and trying to figure out how to navigate. Being first generation, my parents don’t speak much English at all, so I went through a lot of the process alone.”

In the midst of these feelings, Vazquez reflected on about how he landed at Bard College. He shared, “I had to think about what had gotten me to Bard in the first place, which was having support networks, mentoring groups, and a brotherhood that I have been a part of for most of my life.” He needed a support network for men of color at Bard, an institution, that as Vazquez conveyed, “wasn’t designed for us.” He and fellow student Harry Johnson created Brothers@Bard to provide a support group and safe space where men of color could talk about how they were feeling and how to navigate predominantly White spaces.

Not only did Brothers@Bard support each other, members of the group went into the local community to do mentoring with young men of color. From Vazquez’s perspective, the community mentoring “ended up becoming the secret sauce of our model: connecting collegiate men of color to high schoolers. It also created this dual beneficiary approach to youth development, where we were helping young men of color to graduate from high school, while also helping get ourselves through college and onto graduation.”

Although Vazquez has since graduated from Bard College, Brothers@Bard still exists – but has grown to be Brothers@. The organization now works with high school boys of color, mainly from low-income homes as well as college men of color. As Vazquez shared “Academically, we like to work with what we consider the “forgotten middle,” or young men who don’t fall on either extreme of the need’s spectrum. Often these are high school students that just need someone to talk to and offer support and could otherwise easily fall between the cracks.” Regarding the organization’s work with college students, Vazquez noted, “We work with students who are often first generation and from backgrounds very similar to my own; or guys who may not be the first in their family to go to college, but they are still struggling to navigate white institutions and find their place on campus.”

Vazquez believes the most important gap that Brothers@ fills is providing a “safe space to get together and open up.” He says that these spaces for men of color are rare. More concretely, Brothers@ offers academic support and resources to high school students, such as SAT prep, early college development and access support, assistance with writing personal statements for college applications, and help completing the FAFSA, which is a link to financial aid support. With undergrad students, the nonprofit works to connect young men of color with internships and other career development opportunities. For this group specifically, Brothers@ has a youth development certification process so that the men earn certification in doing mentoring work with high schoolers.

Vazquez is not only focused on men of color. He also wants to change the institutions that make them feel excluded and feel that they don’t belong. He shared, “So much of our work at Brothers@ is also about what the institutions themselves need to do. We really focus on challenging white-led institutions to hold up a mirror and grapple with the fact that they’re not supporting these populations adequately, and haven’t been doing so.” He added, “It’s so important to reframe the conversation so that it’s less about us being the problem, or that we’re the ones needing to be fixed. Instead, why aren’t the institutions seeing themselves as the issue when they have young men of color dropping out in droves?”

Vazquez believes that colleges and universities “need to be open to co-designing the student experience with their students, elevating their voices, and hearing from them what their experiences are really like.” His ideas are in sync with new research by Clifton Conrad and Todd Lundberg, who in their book Learning with Others: Collaboration as a Pathway to College Student Success, advocate for blended roles between faculty and students around learning and the student experience. Vazquez also suggests that institutions of higher education engage students in conversations where their wants and needs are centered” and suggests a few ways this can be done. Specifically, colleges and universities can create more spaces on campus where these dialogues can happen; increase faculty diversity as over 75% of college and university faculty are White; and wrestle with their own history of exclusion.

Although Brothers@ began at Bard, and is still present at the small college, the organization has grown because of financial support from the state of New York’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative and the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust. Vazquez hopes to position Brothers@ more solidly as a thought leader when it comes to persistence work in higher education, and what that looks like in practice. As he shared, “My goal is to have about 10 institutions, private and public across New York state, that come aboard as members and take on the task of redesigning their institutions, and really thinking about how they can become more inclusive of and for young men of color.” Ultimately, Vazquez would like people to think about Brothers@ when they think about persistence and diversity and inclusion work, noting “they should automatically think of us.”