Co-founders Jason Warwin and Khary Lazarre-White, who have been friends since the age of five, created The Brotherhood when they were seniors at Brown University in 1994 on the Southside of Providence at the John Hope Community Center. They recognized the obstacles young men face growing up in poverty, and they believed that the creation of a strong, supportive community could help youth overcome challenges of circumstance and succeed in life. They began work with a group of fifteen deeply disaffected youth and within one year and helped guide all but one of these young men away from criminal activity, disassociated behavior and back into school and stable lives.
They brought their innovative and successful youth development model for young men to New York City in 1995, and incorporated The Brotherhood as a nonprofit. Jason and Khary began working with about 45 young men in two public schools – one of the schools was Jason’s former high school, Central Park East in East Harlem. Over the next three years they hired additional staff, wrote a curriculum that still serves as the organization’s pedagogical base today, grew the organization, and doubled the number of young people in the program. The model drew immediate attention and recognition for its innovation, unqiueness and documented outcomes.
In 1998, Dr. Susan Wilcox joined Jason and Khary as a Co-Executive Director and the organization expanded to include programs for young women and was renamed The Brotherhood Sister Sol. Susan served in this role for 7 years. For over 15 years, Cidra M. Sebastien served as Associate Executive Director, helping to steer the organization before departing in 2019. Jason left BroSis in 2007 and spent 7 years in Brazil, before returning to BroSis, where he expanded our programming to a town outside of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil – programming that continues to this day. Our programming is currently directed by Jason (Associate Executive Director for Programing and Training), Wendy De Jesus, our Associate Director for Programming who leads our work with young women and girls and with our elementary aged children, Silvia Canales who is our Director of College, Career and Wellness, and Austin Greene, who leads our arts and organizing programming and joined the now four person program leadership team in 2026. Wendy and Silvia joined the staff of BroSis in 2001.
Khary has served as the sole Executive Director of BroSis since 2009.
The organization has grown steadily from 1995 into what it is today: a comprehensive and multi-service social justice youth development organization that focused on the intersectional work of educating, organizing and training the field. For over 30 years, The Brotherhood Sister Sol has been at the forefront of social justice, educating, organizing, and training to challenge inequity and champion opportunity for all. With a focus on Black and Latinx youth, BroSis is where young people claim the power of their history, identity, and community to build the future they want to see.
Through unconditional love, around-the-clock support, and wraparound programming, we make space for Black and Latinx young people to examine their roots, define their stories, and awaken their agency. BroSis is deeply rooted in teaching young people to form and hone a moral and ethical code and to undergo a political transformation that leads to understanding the inequity that our youth face directly, as well as those around the world, so that through this education they can become social changemakers. The organization organizes for structural change with regards to three main issues: criminal justice; environmental justice; and educational access and equity for underserved young people.
BroSis is a broadly reaching not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing youth into empowered critical thinkers and community leaders. Our “Theory of Change” is to provide multi-layered support, guidance, education, and love to our membership; to teach them to have self-discipline and form order in their lives; and to then offer opportunities and access so they may develop agency.
We are committed to helping youth develop their minds, bodies, and spirits in a healthy manner, ensuring their development into strong and successful adults. We offer long-term, intense involvement with our participants over the course of their secondary school careers and provide distinctive wrap-around services that support their personal development and academic achievement. We help our members to break cycles of poverty, to become social justice makers and hone their voices to create change, and we provide a platform for our members, alumni, and staff to alter the conversation – redefining norms of manhood and womanhood and speaking out for full freedom and access.
Our educational pedagogy is based on 12 Curriculum Focus Issues. We offer four- to six-year rites of passage programming, after-school care, counseling, summer camp, job training, college preparation, employment opportunities, activist training, community gardening and environmental education, mental health support, intensive arts programming, and international study programs to Africa and Latin America. For our recent alumni, we provide support to ensure they remain in college or employed and they continue to make healthy and productive choices in their lives.
Under Jason’s leadership, we have created a BroSis Training Institute, which allows us to spread the word and train the field. To date, we have trained over 3,000 educators from 250 schools and organizations from around the country to serve another 25,000 young people. We have also published 5 books of curricula and collections of our members’ writings.
In 2022, we moved into our new home – a state-of-the-art, newly constructed 22,000 square foot home for BroSis. This new building, a beacon for youth development and out-of-school time engagement, a center for our organizing and training, was designed by the architectural firm of Urban Architectural Initiatives. It has been widely recognized for its design and has been featured twice in the New York Times, which deemed it “an instant landmark.” Khary led the effort – the fundraising, design, and construction management.
The Brotherhood Sister Sol has received national recognition for our model. BroSis is widely seen as a leader in the field, a revered model of innovation, and consistency.
BroSis members achieve and excel in all documented outcome areas, far surpassing their similarly situated peers, and developing into informed leaders able to comment on the essential issues of the day.
Now, over 30 years since our founding, BroSis remains committed to the ideals and goals on which it was founded. We are a community-based, not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing youth into empowered critical thinkers and community leaders. We offer long-term and holistic intensive involvement with our members – education, support, guidance, love, and discipline. We seek to help to build strong women and men, brothers and sisters, leaders in their communities. We provide access to opportunities and the knowledge on how to secure and navigate these opportunities in order to survive the conditions they face, and to build stable lives. We work for justice and equity and full access.
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"What brought me to The Brotherhood Sister Sol is that this organization is attempting to find relevant solutions to the desperate situations facing our young people in the community. The services they provide are invaluable. They are a significant island in a vast sea."
"I’ve stood on platforms around the world…many occasions that would be…auspicious, important. I have been anointed, I have been blessed and I have been admired, and I am now at my eighty-third year in life. I can honestly say with total recall, that no other event has ever meant this much to me as this evening, this very moment, in my public life."
