The Work and Where It Came From

Dr. RB’s path into this work was not a career pivot or strategic decision. It started with his son, just turned one, holding his finger. Looking at him, Dr. RB felt the familiar calculation of every parent trying to shorten the distance between where a child starts and where you hope they end up, but the thought didn’t stay there.

“I’m looking at him, and I’m thinking, I got to make sure he doesn’t go through what I went through. But then, what about all the other Black boys? I can’t just be selfish.”

THEACADEMY365 launched September 21, 2019. The following year, his younger brother was murdered on September 9, 2020. Dr. RB was days away from the organization’s one-year mark when it happened. He considered stepping away while the people around him kept things running. He came back. The grief has never left him, but it has also never stopped being fuel.

“It motivates me every day, because I know what can easily happen. I’ve lived it.”

What Dr. RB went through as a young man growing up in a Haitian immigrant household in New Jersey, with the fear-driven parenting, the gaps that left between intention and outcome, and the racism he experienced in a school district (he would later learn had been formally segregating students by neighborhood), is not just backstory; it is the analytical foundation for the program he built. He knows the terrain because he walked it.

Discipline Meets Consistency

The name THEACADEMY365 is two ideas pressed together. “Academy,” Dr. RB explains, is associatively linked with discipline, whereas “365” signals consistency, which is the harder thing to build and the one most youth programs lose first. Together they describe not just an aspiration but a promise that the organization will be there, in the same form, adhering to the same commitments, regardless of what else is happening.

The program meets three weekends a month. Friday nights are Champions Corner: academic support, reading and writing, math and science, and college prep for the young men approaching that decision. Saturday mornings are Champions Think Tank: workshops, field trips, and other structured programming. Each “coach” carries a maximum of five “champions.” Enrollment opens for exactly one month each year; the number of available spots is set by how many coaches exist to fill them.

“I never want to get to the situation where we have more champions than we have coaches.”

In terms of scaling, Dr. RB believes growth that outruns the organization’s capacity to show up is not progress; it is a betrayal of the model. When a cohort graduates, those spots open. The pace of expansion is set by the people available to do the work, not by the funding available to advertise it.

What Belonging Actually Requires

Dr. RB returns several times in the conversation to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), specifically to homecoming, and the fact that people come back 40-60 years after graduating, and what that longevity reveals; the institution built something that made them feel they belonged to it from the first day they arrived. THEACADEMY365 is built around the same idea, applied to young men who have spent most of their lives in spaces that communicated the opposite.

“When a champion walks in for the first time, they’ll see pictures of past champions, and they’re like, ‘Wait, this is dope.’ That sense of belonging starts from day one. You are our family. You’re a champion.”

The title of champion is not decorative. It carries an expectation of a certain mindset, a set of standards, and a way of showing up that the organization has to model first. Coaches who cannot meet that standard on any given day are encouraged to acknowledge it and step back; the young men are extended the same grace.

“If you know you can’t show up the way we need you to show up today, it’s okay if you’re not here.”

They almost always come anyway, he notes; the implicit trust within the offer matters more than the acceptance of it.

On Mental Health

“Why don’t Black boys smile?” is a question Dr. RB hears often. It’s usually asked as if the answer were a mystery, but he doesn’t think so. He was one of those boys.

Mental health at THEACADEMY365 is the underlying condition the program is trying to promote and protect. Vulnerability gets normalized not through instruction but demonstration. Dr. RB has been open with his champions about his own grief. Some of them were present, or nearby, when news of his brother’s murder became known. That was not a lesson plan; it was a fact about the person running the program, actively shaping how the organization understood what it is doing, and an experience in empathy for everyone involved.

“Many of them have seen my vulnerable side. I meet everybody where they’re at, because you never know what you can learn from somebody else.”

The Zip Code Problem

In July 1993, Dr. RB’s family bought their first home in America, in Maplewood, New Jersey, a town with a good school district where, when they arrived, they were one of two Black families on the street. Within six months, the white neighbors had left. Dr. RB was young and didn't have a framework for it yet; he just noticed people moving away. What his parents couldn't see was that the school district they had specifically chosen for its reputation was, at the same time, segregating students by where they lived within the city, effectively routing Black children from certain neighborhoods away from the better resources inside the same system. It took until 2020, when a lawsuit was settled, for that to become a matter of public record. He and his siblings had been part of it the whole time, in a “good” district that had been working against them.

“A zip code don’t matter. My parents thought as long as they’re not around gangs and crime, we’re good. But the harm is being committed by the ones who wear the suits… the ones who run the school districts.”

His parents did everything right by the available logic, moved to a better zip code and got away from visible danger, yet the harm came anyway, this time wearing a suit. Preparing young men for that world means preparing them to recognize danger that arrives through official channels, not just the kind that announces itself on a street corner.

What Real Impact Looks Like (and What It Doesn’t)

In 2020, THEACADEMY365 had a merchandise store. The organization was using SEO and targeted advertising to drive traffic, and the data revealed something Dr. RB found deeply uncomfortable: sales spiked every time a Black man was killed by police. He shut the store down.

It is, in miniature, the same concern he brings to conversations with donors and funders more broadly. Giving driven by proximity to tragedy, by guilt or visibility, or the feeling of doing something, is not the same as giving driven by understanding what the work actually is. What he asks of funders is not a check but attention: come to a program, hear the stories that do not make news, and learn to recognize success in forms that are hard to quantify.

“Our impact isn’t how much grants we get or how much money people donate to us. It’s the impact.”

“Real” Models

THEACADEMY365 does not use the phrase “role model.” Role models are LeBron James, people who occupy a position and get paid in some form to be looked up to. Real models are the people showing up when there is no audience: the coaches, the mentors. Dr. RB himself is available to parents at all hours, attends every graduation, and counts 13 commencements on the calendar this June.

“You don’t got to be a tough guy. You just got to be a real guy. You be a real person in leadership, and people will follow.”

He extends that logic to parents. He tells them what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. He apologizes to his own children when he is wrong, holding parents to the same accountability framework as the champions; the culture he is trying to build has to have somewhere to go when the champions go home.

Key Takeaways

• Belonging is structural. The physical space, the naming conventions, the presence of coaches, etc., all of it is designed to communicate, before anything is said, that a young man is expected and wanted there.
• Consistency is what makes accountability possible. Real models show up without an audience. The organization’s ability to hold young men to a standard depends entirely on the people around them doing the same.
• Growth that outruns care is not growth. Enrollment is constrained by the number of coaches available, not by funding or demand. Adding champions without the capacity to serve them is treated as a breach of the program’s core promise.
• Mental health is the ultimate precondition. Academic and professional outcomes depend on a young man’s capacity to be present. That capacity is what THEACADEMY365 works to establish first.
• A changed address does not change the underlying conditions. Preparing young men for the world means preparing them for its institutional dangers, which rarely announce themselves and are often harder to name than the visible ones.
• Impact is relational and long-dated. The measure of what THEACADEMY365 builds is whether a young man, years after leaving the program, still knows he has somewhere to call that will pick up.

In April 2026, the Oranges and Maplewood Branch of the NAACP named Dr. RB a 2026 Education Award honoree. He typically declines awards, he did not found the organization to receive them, and had already drafted a polite excuse. He had run the New Jersey Marathon that morning; then, he checked the date of the ceremony and realized it fell one year to the day from when he had sat in a courtroom listening to the verdict in his brother's murder trial. He went.

“I knew that it meant more to just go get it, because I was going to be able to dedicate it to him.”

There is a line Dr. RB did not write but has adopted as the organization’s unofficial operating principle: “This is the long game. Let’s play like everything depends on it, because it does.” The long game, for him, is not a horizon; it is an acknowledgment that the conditions the program exists to address are not going away, that Black boys are being born into them continuously, and that the only appropriate response is to still be there when they arrive.