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The
Student African American
Brotherhood (SAAB): Building a
positive peer-support community
In any given
week, if you visit certain
college campuses across the
country, you might encounter a
group of African-American and
Latino male students in a
meeting. At first, your
attention might be drawn to the
fact that each of the students
is wearing a shirt and tie.
After observing
the business-like manner in
which the young men run their
meeting, and hearing the
students talk about ways to be
successful, you would realize
you had just observed a powerful
example of what can be
accomplished when young men work
together to achieve their goals.
For these students, the goal is
to receive a college degree and
continue to make their mark in
the world—in the workforce or by
furthering their graduate or
professional education. These
young men are members of the
Student African American
Brotherhood, or SAAB. |
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Stony Brook University
students gather after a SAAB
meeting. |
SAAB is an academic
mentorship program for African-American and
Latino young men. Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe founded
SAAB in 1990 at Georgia Southwestern
State University as his response to the
educational statistics that consistently
showed that African-American and Latino men
graduated college at lower rates than their
White counterparts. From its inception,
SAAB’s goal has been to increase
college graduation rates for
African-American and Latino males by helping
to create a positive peer environment on
students’ school campuses.
The organization helps its
members excel academically, socially,
culturally, and spiritually, and fosters a
commitment to civic engagement through its
chapters’ emphasis on community service and
mentoring. SAAB uses a multi-faceted
approach to mentoring by promoting
relationships between peers as well as
faculty advisor-to-student mentoring and
older-student-to-younger-student mentoring.
Headquartered at the University of Toledo
for the past five years, SAAB has
grown to over 200 chapters at the middle
school, high school, and collegiate levels.
As SAAB’s leadership
establishes new chapters across the country,
it recognizes a need for program
effectiveness data to share with its
stakeholders including funders,
participating universities, and researchers.
With funding from the Lumina Foundation for
Education, SAAB engaged OMG Center to
help build its organizational capacity to
collect data on program effectiveness, and
to evaluate SAAB’s impact on college
access and success.
In 2009, OMG Center conducted
site visits to three of SAAB’s collegiate
chapters to learn more about SAAB at
an organizational level, gain insight, and
record the individual stories of the
students. OMG is now working with SAAB’s
national leadership to develop a
data collection system that chapters will
use as part of their daily work.
OMG Center for Collaborative
Learning – LINKAGES Newsletter – Summer,
2010 -
http://www.omgcenter.org/PDF/Linkages-2010.pdf
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