The 100 Black Men is a national organization founded in New York City over 20 years ago. It currently has over 100 chapters globally. The idea was that if 100 black men can come together, we could make a difference in the life of kids.
The 100 Black Men of Stamford, Inc. was founded in 1993, as a non-profit community action organization comprised of successful men committed to improving the educational and economic conditions for African Americans and others in need, with a particular focus on the development of youth. We are an affiliate of the 100 Black Men of America, Inc.
As such we facilitate our goals through four major areas of concentration: Mentoring, Education, Health and Wellness and Economic Development. Our mentoring and educational programs anchor the 100’s activities, enabling us to provide services to nearly 1000 young people in the Greater Stamford area. These programs are unprecedented, representing our highest levels of achievement and clearly establishing the 100 as a standard in youth advocacy.
As our world continues to change, nurturing young people is the best way to ensure the success of our collective future. Guiding today’s youth in becoming well-educated prepared adults is a moral imperative and practical benefit to our whole society.
What We Do
Four Focus Areas
- mentoring
We focus primarily on 4 areas. First and foremost, we’re a mentoring organization where our focus is helping kids who are in need, might not otherwise get some of the opportunities. These tend to be kids of color, both young men and young women, that are in and around the Stamford and lower Fairfield County area. We do this both through individual mentoring programs, but a lot of our programs are group mentoring. I will talk about those individually a little bit.
- health and wellness
Second is that we focus on health and wellness. Several of our programs specifically are youth golf and youth tennis, have exercise piece is the background to it, …
- Education
but also it’s about the educational component of it which is our third which is helping folks see and learn new and different things and being exposed to it. One of the key programs we have under that is our Lego robotics where we teach kids how to make robots out of Lego pieces. They learn engineering concepts and a number of things of that nature.
- economic development
The last is economic development, which is really things such as financial literacy. How do I have a check book? What do I do with it? How do I balance it? What are stocks and bonds? What are those kinds of things?
History
This is a piece that talks about the history of the 100 and how the Stamford chapter came to be. Going back to about 20 years ago, the 100 Black Men was founded in New York City. The idea was that if 100 black men can come together, we could make a difference in the life of kids. This chapter here in Stamford is an outgrowth.
It’s now a national organization with roughly 115 chapters around the country, a few that are off shore, one in London and down in the Bahamas. There are various different sizes from major cities like in Chicago and New York where they are very large to small cities like maybe Shreveport, Louisiana or Beaumont, Texas.
Here in Stamford, we are considered a midsize chapter. We now have just under 40 members and we’re growing and hope to be able to eclipse that to get into 50 to 60 in the next year or so.
