The Bakari^© Project: A Lifeline for African American Adolescent Development and Success

Abstract

The Bakari© Project is an African-centered, community-based, educational, and mentoring program for adolescent youth. The program is designed to address the challenges Black youth and other youth of color face in negotiating the community terrain between the home, school, and community, including the contact young people often encounter with law enforcement and the criminal justice systems. We assert that there is a nexus between critical elements in the communities that form a triangle for success and that too often, the aforementioned components are not working together because each dimension of the triangle blames the other for the challenges the youth face and the failures they experience. In answering the question of what is the role of Black psychologists in this process, this article is intended to invite readers to help reconnect the triangle, while introducing a model and method of effectively intervening in the lives of young people who may struggle with successfully navigating the developmental transition of adolescence to young adulthood. We conclude with a call for implementing similar programs in communities throughout the United States.

Growing but Not Grown: Adolescent Black Girls’ Reasoning About a Hypothetical and Challenging Social Situation

“…We used a team-based ethnographic approach guided by the Participatory Culture-Specific Intervention Model (PC-SIM; Nastasi et al, 2004; Varjas et al, 2005) and reflections on culturally competent qualitative research among people of African descent (Lyons et al, 2012). Africentric models have emphasized cooperative approaches to cultivating relationships, developing skills, and increasing self-awareness (Caldwell-Gunes & Parham, 2020) and collective approaches that include storytelling through testifying and facilitated group processes (Chioneso et al, 2020).…”

Attachment Neuroscience and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nonviolence Philosophy: Implications for the 21st Century and Beyond

“…KNRT also complements various racial identity models. The KNRT approach may help people to navigate the formation of racial identity better, which may have implications for dealing with issues of race and racism within a variety of contexts, including educational settings and clinical work (Caldwell-Gunes & Parham, 2020; Liu et al, 2019; Worrell et al, 2020). For example, KNRT may be helpful in overcoming the distress associated with Black self-hatred identity.…”

“…KNRT appears to be complementary to other cultural-based approaches. PVEST emphasizes the necessity of being aware of and changing contextual factors that impact human development, and KNRT offers a conceptually viable approach for achieving such changes, ranging from internalized racism to structural racism (Caldwell-Gunes & Parham, 2020;Leary, 2005;Spencer et al, 1997). KNRT also complements various racial identity models.…”