Baton Rouge Youth Coalition offers its underresourced students a chance at higher education—while sharpening their life skills in the process
Before joining the Baton Rouge Youth Coalition, 19-year-old Javian Pierson didn’t know how she’d get to college.
While she always wanted to receive a higher education, she says that—like many other underresourced Baton Rouge youth—she didn’t have the resources to explore her options.
With the help of Baton Rouge Youth Coalition staff, Pierson was offered five scholarships and admission to three colleges after graduating from Scotlandville Magnet High School.
BRYC, founded in 2009, is a non-profit that aims at providing high-achieving, underresourced youth with a healthy environment and the resources and professional connections to get accepted to and graduate from college.
“BRYC is an environment where everyone is supportive of one another. It’s also an environment where being smart, loving to read and wanting to learn more is celebrated. I have worked in schools where that’s not always the case. A lot of our students come here and feel like they can really be themselves,” says Aaron Randolph, director of sophomore programs.
At the BRYC building downtown, colorful university pennants and college acceptance letters cover the upstairs hallways. In addition to leadership seminars, scholarship applications and ACT prep, students have access to laptops, college tours and social activities such as yoga, poetry and a step team.
For students who might be having trouble coping with recent events in Baton Rouge, such as Alton Sterling’s death and the August flood, BRYC provides support and a safe space. Some of the students from The Wave, the youth-led peaceful protest through downtown the weekend after Sterling’s death, were from BRYC. Ultimately, the organization strives to build a better future for its students as they build both their education and life skills.
“It’s not enough for them to just be smart or intelligent—we want them to be active and engaged in the world around them,” Randolph says. “That means learning about themselves and who they are, but also learning about how to navigate the world that they live in.”
It’s the best feeling in the world sending the students to colleges around the nation, adds LaShawn Robertson, director of senior programs.
“We just open the doors for them and say, ‘It exists,’” she says. “Even if there’s people in your community who haven’t been to college—coming to BRYC—that’s what you’re here [for]. College is the endgame.”
“One of the things that really stood out to me about BRYC was the college tours. For someone from my background, college tours weren’t anything that was really feasible at the time, because normally you have to pay for that.
Since being a senior, I probably come here four days out of the five-day school week. It’s such a heartwarming experience just knowing that you have people out there other than your parents who care so much about you.
It was actually three high school girls from BRYC who planned the peaceful march that happened downtown for Alton Sterling.
I’ve never been a part of anything like that, and it just made me feel so powerful to know that we had the support of BRYC behind us. We did everything right—we got permission from the state to do the protest and everything. I can only imagine how Martin Luther King, Jr. felt.” – Javian Pierson, senior fellow at BRYC
Read more from our cover story, featuring people standing up to solve racial issues in Baton Rouge.
This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.
