blog
December 20, 2024
Authored by John Bare
When Mays High School seniors gathered for an assembly in April 2024, Morris Brown College President Kevin James delivered a surprise announcement: All 272 seniors at the Atlanta high school had been admitted to Morris Brown.
“We were founded back in 1881,” James told the students. “What makes our institutions very unique is because we’re the only Black college in the state of Georgia that was actually founded by Black people, for Black people.”
At an October 2024 Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Forum gathering of college presidents, James explained that this commitment to open admissions is rooted in Morris Brown’s values. “Saying ‘everyone is welcome’ means just that – everyone is welcome,” James told his peers.
When Morris Brown regained accreditation after two decades of struggle, James held to this commitment even though it requires institutions to be “miracle workers and to produce more with less.” Enabling everyone to flourish, James explained, requires recognizing that different students arrive on campus with different levels of preparation. The college must respond accordingly. It’s Morris Brown’s job to find ways for everyone to succeed, no matter the students’ background.
“A lot of these students are there on campus, and they never thought that they could be the there. This handholding we do is a challenge,” James said.
Across the country, OYF Collaboratives engage tens of thousands of young adults in the work of systems change. The youth-led Collaboratives are using innovative approaches to embed Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose in systemic change in higher education, juvenile justice, job training, and more. College presidents hold touch points across all of these systems and play a critical role in the OYF work.
Other sectors, including philanthropy, must join the pursuit of durable change. Bestselling author Steve Phillips challenged attendees at the Aspen gathering to examine whether systems in their communities really set up to benefit everyone. Access cannot be gimmicky, or ceremonial. Access has to be authentic.
We continually have to ask ourselves, Phillips said, does all mean all? If all of us are created equal, and if all of us have the same rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and if all of us have a fair shot at the American Dream – we have to take a clear-eyed look at the status quo and examine how the results are playing out. We have to be willing to confront power and change systems so that what is happening at Morris Brown happens everywhere – so that everyone is welcome. So that all means all.
In a 2024 article, Phillips challenged philanthropy to join the work to produce a functioning multiracial democracy. “Today, our philanthropic system rewards need instead of success: The greater the need, the more compelling the case for philanthropic support. But this approach creates perverse incentives that discourage individual progress or any sense of agency and pride in achievement. Even when an intervention succeeds, credit goes to the nonprofit or the funder, not to those who converted the support into success. We need to invert this pattern and begin to reward individual and community-driven initiatives. Funders must search for glimmers of progress within communities by identifying people on the path to success, rather than those with the greatest needs.”
Watch OYF Convening Fall 2024 Closing Plenary: Philanthropy’s Role in Building Civic Infrastructure