Fern Gillespie
Barry Cooper, known as “Coach Coop,” has inspired hundreds of young Black and Brown men in Brooklyn’s underserved neighborhoods. Not as a sports coach, but as a life coach for youth. The founder of The B.R.O. Experience Foundation in Bed Stuy, Cooper’s positive impact has earned the prestigious 2025 David Prize, an annual grant award that invests $200,000 in individuals who are committed to a better New York City and the 2026 Brooklyn Org Spark Prize, a grant of $100,000 to Brooklyn trailblazing nonprofits.
Cooper is reinvesting the grants into the B.R.O. Experience program, which has 19 staffers. A lifelong Bed Stuy resident, he has created a career as a “safe space” advocate for Black and Brown young men. It’s a journey that took him from creating a “safe space” as a barbershop owner to Dean and Director of Culture at Eagle Academy for Young Men to adjunct instructor at CUNY Fatherhood Academy to earning an associate degree in educational psychology to vice-chair of the Brooklyn NAACP Educational Committee to establishing the B.R.O. Experience Foundation.
Established in 2020, the B.R.O. Experience Foundation’s center is located in a 4,500 square foot space at 7 Marcus Garvey Blvd. Over 1,000 young Black and Brown men have been a part of the B.R.O. Experience through participating in the program through the center or schools. It’s a community that empowers young men to become impactful leaders through transformational programs that foster confidence and resilience. Our Time Press spoke to Barry Cooper about his mission to encourage young Black and Brown men to drive positive change in their communities.
OTP: Why did you decide to create the B.R.O. Experience?
Cooper: During the pandemic, I was trying to decide what my next step was going to be. I decided to start a nonprofit organization called the B.R.O. Experience. It is a nonprofit that supports young men of color and the understanding of emotional regulation and cognitive behavior therapy. It’s a safe space for guys just to come to get support both mentally and socially.
It’s a safe space where they can come and eat and play video games and get one-to-one support. Whatever it is that they need to help them develop their character in a way that’s successful to them. We’re in our sixth year. So that’s what most of the inspiration has come from. Just having that lived experience and not really having a safe space of my own. God gave me the vision to create one for others.
OTP: What are the programs at the B.R.O. Experience space?
Cooper: We have a number of different programs. We have the B.R.O. Space and Wellness Center at 7 Marcus Garvey in Bed Stuy. It’s home to a number of different programs we run like the B.R.O. Project, which supports young men 18 to 24 who are disconnected from school, disconnected from working and just trying to find who they are in this crazy world of ours.
What we do is a 10-month rites of passage program through cognitive and behavioral therapy and critical consciousness. We actually help them pull back the layers of self and really self-develop as humans. The other programs that we have and events that we do are centered around the cultivation and development of young men of color. We also have social workers who support guys who may need, just a little extra support around things that they want to accomplish with self. We do that every single day. We run a program called Little Brother B.R.O Experience.
That is for third to sixth grade boys and we support them in literacy. We help them with their reading and comprehension. The other half is character development and teaching them about emotions as they are developing as young men. The last program is a music therapy program that we also do with high schools. It’s called Behind the Bars, where we use hip hop lyrics to create therapeutic spaces for young men. We are addressing the school to prison pipeline conversation.
But we are attacking it from the lens of social character development of the participants that we have in front of us.
OTP: What was a recent interesting experience that showed you the impact of the B.R.O. Experience?
Cooper: A couple of months ago, we took some guys to the Catskills to practice meditation for the first time. They were very resistant to it until they got there. To see them just like open up and fully engulf the work and the meditation sessions in a way that they probably wouldn’t have done in the city.
So, we just give them that exposure therapy. What you start to see is that they develop not only a sense of self, but an awareness that they do have the ability to be advocates in their community.
OTP: Why is it important to focus on the mental health of young Black men?
Cooper: It’s important to focus on young Black men because we are the very fabric of the good and the bad of our community. Oftentimes when we look at the news and they’re doing drug busts or gang arrests, it is seeing majority Black and Brown males. Historically in our communities where young men are not doing well, it hurts the fabrics of our community.
Children are growing up without fathers. Fathers who are there operating from the apathetic standpoint that they are not really providing. So, when we get our young men to have a sense of self, we’re actually creating a community that is thriving. I think historically, Black and Brown women have found ways to keep us together as community. I think that it’s just our job as an organization to help just mitigate and lift some of that burden off the shoulders of these women through cultivating the next generation of a Black and Brown man. That’s why I’m grateful for what they’ve done.
Society has learned that as long as you keep a Black and Brown boy chasing some money or chasing toxic masculine ways, they don’t have to come into our communities because we end up destroying it ourselves. So, I really feel like that is why it’s so critical for us to create the spaces and do the work that we’re doing.
For more information on the B.R.O. Experience, visit www.thebroexperience.org