#100Kmasks Challenge

By Sam Piha

The Ever Forward Club (Oakland) works with boys and young men to promote greater self awareness and awareness of others - both critical components to social emotional learning and character building. Their efforts include work in schools and trainings of educators and youth workers. They were also featured in a documentary entitled The Mask You Live In. 

Ashanti Branch, Founder and Executive Director of the Ever Forward Club, was a featured presenter and workshop leader at the recent How Kids Learn VII conference in Oakland, CA. 

Darius Simpson

The Ever Forward Club has launched a #100Kmasks challenge. Below is an interview with Darius Simpson, Program Officer at the Ever Forward Club, about this challenge which can involve both adults and youth.

Q: Can you say a little bit about the Ever Forward Club?

A: Ever Forward aims to address the underlying causes of dropouts, the growing achievement gap of inner-city youth and youth violence in a preventive manner. The Ever Forward Club is a mentoring and youth development program for young men in grades 6-12. We have 3 programs, Ever Forward Club, Ever Forward Professional Development, and Ever Forward Experiences. 

Ever Forward is featured in a documentary called, The Mask You Live In (view the trailer below), which is an exploration of American Masculinity and how the hyper-masculine narrative of what it means to be a man, is failing our boys. 

Q: Can you describe the #100Kmasks challenge? 

A: The #100kMasks Challenge is a resource we provide to give a brief introduction to the larger work of the organization. With this challenge, we are connecting 100,000 people around the world to show that we are not alone in what we are going through. Students, parents, educators, families, employers, can all take advantage of this tool to build a deeper connection through taking the steps in this exercise. Our work is centered around young men, the #100kMasks cards are a way for us to reach more than just the youth we work with directly. 

Q: Why was this challenge created?

A: Ever Forward was featured in the documentary about American masculinity detailing the toxic ways we define and teach masculinity to our youth. Following the premiere of the documentary, The Mask You Live In, we began traveling all over the country with our signature 'Taking off the Mask' workshop. We wondered how we could make this work more impactful especially for those communities who could not afford to hire us. So using some of our design thinking principles learned at the Stanford D.school, we prototyped, tested and launched the mask card and set a goal of 100,000 masks. So far, we've found that, no matter the age or gender when people see each other's masks, it resonates and there's a community formed from that connection. 

Q: What is the significance of the "Mask"?

A: A mask is a metaphor representing what we allow the world to see about ourselves. We all wear masks for different reasons, at Ever Forward we don't believe the mask is an inherently bad thing. Sometimes a mask is necessary to survive, get from one place to the next. What we've found is that when people,  young men specifically, don't have a space to take off their masks and deal with what’s really happening for them, the mask becomes a part of them. That's where the conversation about what is living in what we call "the back of the mask" comes into our workshops and circles. 

Q: How can people get involved? For those who work with youth, how can they involve their youth?

A: We set a big goal and we really need the community's support in reaching our 100,000 mask goal. Folks can visit 100kmasks.com to let us know how many youth they work with and we can provide them with the tools to take them through the #100kMasks Challenge. We can also be reached @everforwardclub on all social networks. Please follow us, help connect us with people who we can partner with and who may be interested in funding this work. 

Q: The Expanded Learning 360°/365 collaborative is focused on promoting social emotional learning and character building and has defined this using three areas: We Are (self-awareness, self-management), We Belong (social awareness, interpersonal skills), We Can (self-efficacy, growth mindset). How does your mask exercise and workshop address these three areas? 

A: The Ever Forward Club was started to provide a safe space for young men to build connections in a brotherhood and to grow into men of character by helping them to develop healthy social-emotional tools. The work that Ever Forward - Siempre Adelante does with the Ever Forward Club, the Taking Off The Mask workshop and the #100kMasks Challenge is directly related to the areas that the collaborative has highlighted. 

http://partnerforchildren.org/selinelp/

We Are: We help people see their individual unique selves and acknowledge what are the parts of themselves that they allow the world to see. Once they acknowledge this, they can see those things that they are perhaps not dealing with. 

http://partnerforchildren.org/selinelp/

We Belong: Once individuals recognize that they are not the only ones who are going through challenges, it helps them to more deeply connect to belonging to their own humanity and connection to others. 

http://partnerforchildren.org/selinelp/

We Can: I think that once people realize through our workshops or through seeing other masks in this campaign the encouragement is that they can make it, they can overcome the challenges that they face and most importantly they are not alone.

The social-emotional learning framework is so rich and sometimes young people and adults have one or two areas well organized and contextualized, but there are some of the areas that are in need of support and assistance. Our campaign is not designed to focus on any one area in particular, but we find that it helps individuals come alive to a deeper knowledge of themselves. 


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Darius Simpson is an award-winning spoken word artist born in Akron, Ohio. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University. Darius uses poetry as a tool of healing, informing, and challenging his audience. His work was also featured in the film, Finding the Gold Within, a documentary by Karina Epperlein on what it means to be a young black male in America. Currently, Darius lives in Berkeley, CA and works as the Project Manager for the Ever Forward Club's #100kMasks Challenge. Before moving to Berkeley, Darius participated in several screenings and conferences, sponsored by Temescal Associates.

"Taking Off the Mask": Working with School-Age Boys

By Sam Piha

What does it mean to be male? There are many messages that are absorbed by boys and young men - some of which are useful and others that are destructive. 

When Ashanti Branch was a teacher in Oakland, he recognized that boys and young men needed a place to explore this. He left teaching and founded the Ever Forward Club. “At the Ever Forward Club, we believe that all young men have the desire to be fully alive – to be loved, respected, held in high regard, held to high expectations, held accountable for their actions and supported to help achieve their goals.” - Ever Forward Club Website 

In 2014, the Ever Forward Club partnered with The Representation Project to develop the documentary, “The Mask You Live In”. (The Mask You Live In follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity. Experts in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, sports, education, and media also weigh in, offering empirical evidence of the “boy crisis” and tactics to combat it.) See the trailer below. 

We invited Mr. Branch to serve as a speaker and workshop leader On October 17, 2017 as part of our Speaker’s Forum series. 

We also recently conducted a video interview with Mr. Branch asking him about his views on the needs of boys and young men and how we can serve these needs in afterschool. Below are some of his responses.

"Taking Off the Mask": Working with School-Age Boys with Ashanti BranchOctober 17, 2017 in Oakland, CA

“I think that after school programs are becoming aware that there is a need to support young men in really specific ways. This is coming out of this idea that for so long there's been just a place of ignoring boys and allowing certain behaviors to be left as 'boys will be boys' or 'that's just the way boys are.' I think that what has happened is that has been let go for so long that young men have found themselves in a crisis. 

Society doesn't give our young men really good tools with dealing with sadness and fear and shame and other kind of emotions like that. They're clear in what you do when you're angry. They're clear about what you do when you're happy. So if you don't fit in happy or angry, what do you do with the other (not so positive) emotions? Usually it comes out as anger. 

Everything is converted to anger or I just pretend like it doesn't matter, then I get checked out to the world. 

They isolate, many feeling that ‘no one cares about me’. They begin to self-medicate, self-fulfill those feelings of not being a part of the group - engaging in drugs, alcohol, rampant unprotected sex, gangs, etc. Many of these behaviors are about  the need to cover up the feelings that they're really trying to figure out. How do I deal with this real feeling?

The afterschool space gives us a space to help our young men know that, ‘You're valuable. You may not do so good in your bookwork, but you've got a lot of skills.’

The afterschool system works because it allows for some students to get a taste for something else, to get to see how good they can be at something that's not going to be marked as a grade. Their creativity is not going to be taken away and crushed when somebody tells you, ‘your drawing is not according to the rubric’. Afterschool just provides a safer space. 

That's what we're trying to do in Ever Forward. We're trying to do more work around the social-emotional development of our young men, teaching them to be social-emotional leaders, so that it doesn't just happen afterschool. It happens all day long.”
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Ashanti Branch is Founder and Executive Director of The Ever Forward Club. Ashanti works to change how young men of color interact with their education and how their schools interact with them. Raised in Oakland by a single mother on welfare, Ashanti left the inner city to study civil engineering at Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. A construction project manager in his first career, his life changed after he tutored struggling students and realized his passion for teaching. In 2004, during Ashanti’s first year teaching high school math, he started The Ever Forward Club to provide support for African American and Latino males who were not achieving to their potential. Since then, Ever Forward has helped all of its more than 150 members graduate from high school, and 93% of them have gone on to attend two- or four-year colleges, military or trade school.


The Ever Forward Club was featured last year in the documentary, “The Mask You Live In,” which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. After completing a fellowship at the Stanford d.school in 2016, Ashanti, stepped away from working for a school district and began working as the Founding Executive Director for Ever Forward-Siempre Adelante, in an effort to grow the organization to serve thousands of Bay Area students. In April 2017, Ashanti was awarded a fellowship from the national organization CBMA - Campaign for Black Male Achievement.