About – The Village · Rites of Passage

The premise

We train boys and girls to become responsible young men and women – and to join the ranks of today's leaders.

The Village was built on a hard truth and a hopeful one. The hard truth: our young people grow up navigating an uneven playing field, and survival alone is not enough. The hopeful one: with the right passage – deliberate, rigorous, and rooted in heritage – they don't just survive their communities. They lead them.

Drawing on thinkers like Dr. Pedro Noguera, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, and Dr. Cornel West, the curriculum refuses to treat young people as passive. It asks them to take responsibility, to read closely, to speak clearly, and to overstand the systems around them well enough to change their own outcomes.

The Curriculum

Eight passages from the lesson book.

Drawn from The Village Rites of Passage lesson plans developed for our University of Akron engagement.

01

Complicit in Our Own Failure

Naming the assets young men too often lack access to – and examining honestly the choices and mindsets that get in their own way. Paired with Noguera's The Trouble with Black Boys and Henley's Invictus: "I am the master of my fate."

Identity

02

Influential Black Men

A gallery walk of ordinary men who did extraordinary things for their people. Each student finds the figure he connects with most, and writes toward the characteristics he wants to carry.

Role Models

03

A Young Brother in Need

Empathy and brotherhood in practice – learning to recognize when a peer is struggling and to become a bridge builder rather than a bystander.

Brotherhood

04

The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Through Tupac Shakur's poem, students explore resilience: what it means to grow, beautifully and against the odds, from the cracks of a hard environment.

Resilience

05

Dark Girls

An honest look at colorism, the worth of Black women, and the responsibility young men carry in how they see, speak to, and protect them.

Respect

06

Where Do You Stand?

Civic literacy in action – students locate their own values on real government issues and discover where they fit within the structures that govern their lives.

Civics

07

What Would a Good Man Do?

Reading Wes Moore's The Other Wes Moore – two boys, the same name, two different fates – to examine how decisions, mentors, and second chances shape a life.

Character

08

The Master of My Fate

The throughline of the whole journey: committing Invictus to memory and reciting it in unison – owning the conviction that the future is theirs to author.

Commitment

Dr. Mike Brown, Jr.

Co-Founder

Shannon L. Stukes

Co-Founder

The Founders

Two friends who decided to build the village.

Dr. Mike Brown, Jr. and Shannon L. Stukes founded The Village to do one thing well: take young people through a real passage into adulthood. What began as a curriculum grew into staff development, summer cohorts, and parent workshops across communities from Lynn, Massachusetts to Akron, Ohio.

"It takes a village to raise a child," Brown often said, "but schools will never replace the role of parents. A school must see itself as a partner, not a replacement." That belief – community as the engine of growth – runs through every lesson the two of them wrote.

The work continues. The curriculum endures, the method still travels, and in communities across the country the lessons built here are still raising young people into leaders – a complete, proven model for anyone ready to raise their own village.

The Language

How we name the village.

The Student

Kijana

The young person on the journey – entering as a boy or girl, leaving as a young man or woman.

The Teacher

Ulema

The facilitator who leads the lesson, guides discussion, and models the close reading of text.

The Leader

Rubani

The one who opens each session with the credo and holds the room in accountability.

The Way

Akil Method

The Village's framework – self & community, body, money, and mind woven through every session.

Our Reach

A footprint that crossed the country.

What began as a single curriculum grew into cohorts, ceremonies, and staff trainings spanning multiple states – from New England to the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest.

14 yrs

Of building young men and women, and counting

5 states

Communities reached from the Northeast to the Midwest

40/yr

Youth through the Williamsburg program at its height

100%

Of surveyed parents saw greater respect & pride in their child

7

Nguzo Saba principles at the center of every cohort

∞

The work continues today in communities that carry it forward

A legacy still in motion · 2011–present

Seminars & Engagements

Where the work has traveled.

From flagship trainings to community cohorts run by friends and partners across the map.

University of Akron · Ohio

Staff development intensive

A two-day, in-person professional development engagement equipping faculty and staff with the lesson framework and facilitation skills to reach boys and girls of color.

Flagship engagement · Lesson book 2012

Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color

Surviving the Concrete Jungle

A proposal and seminar on building a Rites of Passage program that trains middle and high school boys of color not only to survive the inner city, but to thrive in it – socially, academically, and emotionally.

Philadelphia, PA · COSEBOC

KIPP Academy · Lynn, MA

It Takes a Village

Recurring monthly cohorts and parent workshops, plus a summer ThinkLink cohort of around thirty youth – the home of the five-week summer model and the source of the parent-survey results that proved the work.

Recurring · Summer & year-round

Williamsburg, VA

Cohorts at scale

A large joint program that carried roughly forty young people a year – the Rites of Passage model operating at its fullest reach within a single community.

Virginia · Year-round

St. Mark AME Church · East Orange, NJ

Rites of Passage in the community

A Rites of Passage cohort rooted in the heart of Essex County – carrying the manhood and womanhood training into another community ready to raise its own young leaders.

New Jersey · Community-based

St. Matthew AME Church · Orange, NJ

Taking it to another level

Monthly Rites of Passage programming for young men and women within a faith community – rooting the work in the institutions that have always anchored the village.

Recurring · Faith & community

Becoming is a discipline, not a date.