About the Conference
We are excited to host our fourth annual Black Boys and Men National Symposium on June 11-13, 2025. The symposium continues to grow experiencing a record number of over 400 attendees in 2024. We hope you can join us!
Grand Valley State University seeks to bring together youth service providers, K-12 educators, higher education faculty and staff, and community leaders to understand and interrogate the “systems” that impact the lives of Black boys & men in order to deconstruct and rebuild for their success.
Through a lens of intersectionality, the Black Boys & Men National Symposium looks holistically at the lives of Black boys & men in a variety of educational and other contexts. The symposium is focused on creating a vision for equitable transformation throughout the educational pipeline, from K-12 to higher education and beyond. The symposium is designed to be a place of personal and professional growth for those who walk alongside Black boys & men to engage in discussion, learning, and action.
Goals for Symposium
Goal 1: Bring national partners together to outline a plan for success and create a pipeline to include K-12, higher education, and beyond.
Goal 2: Acknowledge the historical realities that have shaped outcomes for Black boys and men to create new realities.
Goal 3: Identify systemic barriers in order to generate discussion, ideas, and solutions for equity.
Goal 4: Create change agents by sharing leading practices and creating the capacity to create new and better outcomes.
Goal 5: Deconstruct and rebuild systems to create the conditions necessary for the success of Black boys & men.