HOUSTON – Three years after Houston released its Local Action Plan to help the city’s Boys and Young Men of Color (BYMOC), Mayor Turner joined with the Houston Health Department to share the achievements of My Brother’s Keeper Houston and point to its work as a national model.
In 2014, President Barack Obama announced the My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Initiative, which aimed to address opportunity gaps among BYMOC by offering new support from cradle to career through young adulthood. As part of this initiative, President Obama issued the MBK Community Challenge, a public call to action that asked municipalities to implement local action plans focused on expanding opportunity at key inflection points across a young person’s life.
Houston was one of the first cities to accept the challenge and in May of 2015, it launched its MBK Local Action Plan, creating a full-time staff dedicated to the work and investing the vital resources to make the plan a reality. After three years, w ith the support and guidance of Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic municipal consultancy, Houston is one of the first to share its work publicly and well positioned to lead the discussion on what other municipalities can do to enter into this work successfully. Bloomberg Associates worked with the City to develop their Local Action Plan and has been an advisor to their efforts for the past three years including helping to launch Team Up: a sports careers initiative in MBK neighborhoods last year.
Mayor Sylvester Turner: “Houston is a city of opportunity, a city where dreams can come true, a city that helps afford opportunities to succeed in life, despite obstacles. The success of MBK Houston demonstrates how innovation, ambition, collaboration and investment in human capital can help fill the potholes in the lives of our youth by creating a culture of achievement that will enable them to reach their full potential.”
Noel Pinnock, Bureau Chief of Bureau of Youth and Adolescent Health and MBK Houston Lead: “Over the last three years, we have been working tirelessly to ensure our city’s most vulnerable youth populations who are underserved receive the necessary tools and support to discover the champion in themselves. We have worked strategically and intentionally to change the lives of our youth, one at a time.”
Niiobli Armah, Bloomberg Associates: “Success in addressing the persistent gaps in outcomes for young men of color in the country requires strong and unwavering leadership, trust, community-wide collaboration, and a strong management approach. Houston has all of the above, giving us promise that the work will stay strong in the years ahead.”
The MBK initiative has six key focus areas including issues related to early childhood education, workforce preparation and the reduction of crime and violence. Houston designed a series of programs to address these issues and others – including, increasing access to quality education for all children and youth, improving health outcomes for residents, developing a well-trained workforce and making neighborhoods safer.
To Preface:
MBK Houston currently operates in three “feeder pattern” communities, which are clusters of neighborhood schools that allow children to transition from a large number of elementary schools to a smaller number of middle schools, and finally to one or two large high schools. In order to pilot efforts in targeted schools, MBK Houston currently operates its Systems of Care/wraparound services
in Bruce Elementary schools, Fleming Middle School, and Wheatley High School.
Throughout these efforts, the city has collected data to track the programs’ results, select highlights include:
Increasing Literacy
- A Houston replication of Boston Basics – a citywide coalition originating in Boston that utilizes five evidence-based parenting and care-giving principles critical to brain development during the first three years of life – reached 26,064 individuals in MBK neighborhoods
- Total number of books checked-out of the Fleming Middle School library, in 2016-2017 was 1,172, up from 5 in 2015-2016. This increase was a result of a coordinated effort by the school administration to focus its systems of care counseling, college fairs, and onsite supportive groups to promote student utilization of the library.
- At Bruce Elementary School, there was a 10% increase of 3rd graders passing their STAAR standardized reading exam from 2017-2018 to 2017-2016
Increased Police and Youth Relations
- 5,300 Houston police personnel will participate in a four-hour training on youth safety, aimed at reducing social distance between at-risk youth and law enforcement. This is a result of the Texas statewide Community Safety Act Curriculum, which MBK Houston will be leading the efforts in the city of Houston.
Providing Second Chances
- In recent years, many are looking to have Criminal record expunctions, giving those previously arrested a clean state. A Houston replication of the Clean Slate initiative, which aims to give persons arrested for a crime a ‘clean slate’ by having their arrest and conviction records expunged resulted in 82% of participants in the Clean Slate Cooperative receiving services, such as criminal record expungement, sealing, non-disclosure, or identification restoration. Criminal record expungement is the American equivalent of pardon services in Canada that are available to clear your criminal record and put you on a path to a better and more fulfilling life.
Supporting High School At-Risk Youth
- A total of 700 school credit hours have been recovered among 145 at-risk youth in Momentum Academy to help put students back on the path toward expected high school graduation. Momentum Academy is a partnership with HISD and the City of Houston’s multi-service centers to provide an alternative learning experience for students to help put them back on path towards expected high school graduation.
To read more about MBK Houston’s work over the past few years, please read: My Brother’s Keeper Houston: A City’s Collaborative Effort to Improving the Lives of Boys and Young Men of Color available here.
In addition to the city and its core partners, the initiative also engaged several private partners who helped to oversee and support the work. These key stakeholders are Harris County Protective Services for Children and Adults, Harris Center for Mental Health IDD, Houston-Galveston Area Council, Houston Independent School District, Houston Community College, Communities in Schools of Houston, Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Houston Public Library, 315th Juvenile Court, Workforce Solutions, and the Association for the Advancement of Mexican-Americans.
About MBK Houston
MBK Houston is a cross-sector initiative housed within the Houston Health Department that leverages the expertise of nonprofits, agencies, educational institutions and other partners to coalesce around strategies, evidence-based methodologies, and programs seeking to increase opportunities and close disparity gaps amongst youth of color that persist within Houston communities. The initiative primarily focuses on early childhood development, improving health outcomes, developing a well-trained workforce, and building safer neighborhoods.
About Bloomberg Associates
Bloomberg Associates is an international consulting service founded by Michael R. Bloomberg as a philanthropic venture to help city governments improve the quality of life of their citizens. The organization specializes in eight strategic disciplines for improving urban environments: Cultural Assets Management, Marketing and Communications, Media and Digital Strategies, Municipal Integrity, Social Services, Sustainability, Transportation and Urban Planning. For more information on the consultancy, please visit bloombergassociates.org or follow us on Twitter @Bloombergassoc.
Media Contact:
To request additional information, please contact:
Scott Packard, Houston Health Department, (281) 254-6403 or [email protected]
Sarah Rivers, Weber Shandwick, (469) 917-6205 or [email protected].