KOCO guides our youth towards careers in trades, technology, and entrepreneurship. This initiative further exposes them to real-world job experiences, connects them with mentors, and equips them with resources to secure a promising economic future.

Bronzeville Nia also is collaborating on a research project with the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Great Cities Institute. This project aims to bring forth community-oriented positive changes.

A summer camp that intertwines fun activities with leadership training and academic enhancement.

KOCO’s young leaders collaborate with students, parents, and staff from Dyett High School and Drake Elementary to foster a restorative justice environment. This method, often abbreviated as RJ, champions a community-driven approach that emphasizes healing, mitigates violence, and aims to decrease mass incarceration. RJ is rooted in the most recent research about addressing childhood trauma.

As one of 10 restorative justice hubs in Chicago, KOCO uses a proactive, community-driven approach to promote direct accountability for harm through conflict resolution and healing, rather than punishment and incarceration.

KOCO’s Boys 2 Men program brings together young Black peers in leadership development and community service activities.

The program is designed to assist young Black men in resisting the lure of risky behavior, provide college and career exploration, increase their sense of community/civic engagement and enhance their self-image.

At age 13, Aziya Roberts went to KOCO to complain about how little governments seemed to be doing to find the group of people most likely to go missing in the United States: Black girls and women.

Believing in the importance of youth leadership development, KOCO worked with Aziya to create the first We Walk for Her march to bring attention to those voiceless Chicagoans. What started as a march has turned into a movement.

We Walk for Her has helped raise awareness to the fact that even though Black girls and women go missing more often, their cases are not publicized in the national media. While KOCO does not take full credit, things have changed in Chicago’s newsrooms and in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

In 2021, the sheriff’s office announced the Missing Persons Project, in which detectives would restart searches for a list of 170 missing persons, some missing for more than 80 years. Chicago media increased coverage of the cases of Kierra Coles, Viola Martin, and other missing Black women.

KOCO also created its Girls Lead initiative to give young Black women a platform to advocate for themselves on issues that affect them directly. Too often, well-meaning agencies and officials create well-intended programs that don’t adequately address the conditions that communities see and experience every day.

Girls Lead is one of KOCO’s answers to this mismatch of priorities.