School Mentors

John Del Rio with students

School Mentors Featured in NYC Service PSA

New York City’s new PSA promoting the need for more high school mentors features two of Thrive’s pioneering School Mentors: Jonathan Del Rio (Thrive Collective’s original muse and PS/MS 34 math teacher) and Frederick Castleberry (GQ darling and Harlem Village Academies HS trailblazer). We love sharing our heroes with the rest of the City! HS…

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School Mentors Returns to HVA for Year 3

It’s great to be back! Three years running with School Mentors at Harlem Village Academy High School. The new year kicked off on November 1, 2016 with thirty students and fifteen mentors. Grateful for partners like New Canaan Society and Young Life Central Harlem, who make programs like this one consistently possible.

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Video Premier: Create a Brotherhood

Celebrate our flagship School Mentors program at Harlem Village Academies High School. Featuring Young Life NYC and New Canaan Society. Filmed and directed by 96 Pixels Productions. Produced by Jeremy Del Rio.

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Mentors Talk SEX with Teens

You guessed it. Year after year, the topic that ignites the most passion in teen boys remains sex. Since October, twenty-five Young Life boys from Harlem Village Academy High School and eighteen men from New Canaan Society have met on the first and third Tuesday of every month to explore what real manhood looks like…

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Winning at Dave & Busters

Winter Break means students and mentors create memories off campus. For the second consecutive year, our HVA students and mentors enjoyed their vacation at Dave & Busters in Times Square.

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Five Lives: Mentors Overcome Adversity Too

Raul Baez discusses overcoming adversity with the Brotherhood Fellowship Mentoring students at Harlem Village Academy (12/1/15). After a childhood marred by physical and sexual abuse, Raul ran away at thirteen, dropped out of school, began a 25 year drug addiction, and survived four near death experiences. Five years after completing a 12-year prison sentence for attempted murder,…

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Manhood Essentials

The Brotherhood’s third School Mentors session yesterday at Harlem Village Academy included fingerprinting fun for the mentors, and the introduction of our Manhood Essentials core values of the Brotherhood: Reject Passivity Embrace Responsibility Serve Humbly Lead Courageously Love Sacrificially These values frame the goals of the entire program, including group talks, life skills, professional networking, and…

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The Mentor’s Heartbeat

Meet Gregory Moore, the program coordinator of the Brotherhood Fellowship Mentoring Program at Harlem Village Academy, and hear why twenty business executives are mentoring high school boys in Harlem. The Brotherhood meets for dinner the first and third Tuesday of every month, and individual pairs meet offline in alternating weeks. Our flagship School Mentors program,…

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Expanding to Ridgewood

Our School Mentors programs are expanding from Harlem and Inwood in Manhattan, to Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens, in partnership with Cru High School. We have proudly supported Cru’s area director Danny Cruz in adapting the School Mentors program to fit the particular needs of the freshman class at Grover Cleveland. He launched “All…

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