Growing Grown-Ups In Harlem

Harlem — Broccoli, cucumber, bell peppers, collard greens. Strawberries, blueberries, grapes and tomatoes; runner beans and basil, four big beds of jalapeno peppers. Worms and compost. Hip hop and capoiera. A cheeseburger cookout with all the trimmings: "We have enough food for everyone to eat here, and more," says Nando Rodriguez as kids grab burgers, sliced pineapple and macaroni. "We have enough for seconds and thirds."

Welcome to Annual Planting No. 4 at the garden of Brotherhood/SisterSol, a West Harlem nonprofit that guides kids through the gauntlet of urban adolescence.

A wraparound resource that provides teen education via afterschool, summer and weekend programs, Brotherhood/Sister Sol (BroSis for short) aims "to operate like a well-constructed family," one child at a time, says co-founder Khary Lazare-White. Founded in 1994, when Lazare-White and co-founder Jason Warvin were seniors at Brown University, the fledgling program moved to Harlem in 1995. It has grown to serve 250 young people in a West 143d Street brownstone where the front door is rarely locked.

The organization takes kids at the age many other programs shun—adolescence and high school. Year-round programs develop high-school community activists, and a structured afterschool curriculum leads young teens into young adulthood in annual, calibrated blocks, via BroSis "chapters" of 10 to 19 youth, led by two adult leaders.

The chapters are single-sex, so conversation’s not encumbered—and subjects aren’t restricted to what’s safe in mixed company. Workshops focus initially on building awareness of the wider community, developing critical thinking and social skills essential to navigating a dynamic urban environment and building youth leadership. Each group crafts its own oaths of dedication and participates in formal Rites of Passage that help to define the growth from adolescence to young adulthood. The organization’s International Study Program even takes groups of students overseas every summer—to Africa, to Brazil—for a month of study, adventure and cultural history.

The garden, carved from vacant lots, is Nando's baby. Its designer and keeper, Rodriguez began with BroSis as a high-school student and serves now as a group leader and coordinator of the organization's environmental programs.

Raphael Santiago, 30, called Ralphie, is a founding youth member of BroSis who now serves as the organization's arts coordinator. He and Nando met in eighth grade, in a community garden on the Lower East Side but, Ralphie says he's been gardening since fourth grade. In fact, he adds, "I got Nando into it."

Santiago grew up on the Lower East Side with four sisters and one brother. "Growing up was very hard. I had no role models," he said, as kids jumped rope and dug worms in the garden. "No one in my neighborhood went to school, finished high school, and went to college." Raphael did; he graduated from Wesleyan in 2003, with a degree in American Studies. BroSis taught him "how to be a man," he says, "and how my being a man affects women. I can be an agent of change or an agent of oppression."

To date, 88 percent of Bro/Sis alumni have graduated from high school—in a neighborhood where only 42 percent of kids, and one in three black males, reach that milestone. Ninety-five percent of those graduates are either in college or work full-time; none are incarcerated (compared with one in three black men aged 20 to 29). Few have become young parents and all of the young BroSis fathers are connected to their kids, living with their children's mothers or with primary custody or visitation rights.