THAT WORK: THE BKLYN COMBINE

words by Phillip Shung, Kenneth J. Montgomery, and keith white | image by Phillip Shung

IDENTIFICATION: We would identify the Combine as a collective that focuses on education, art, and organizing to address inequities in the Black community. In the collective, you got lawyers, you got designers, creative publications like HYCIDE, film directors, etc. We use these networks to help broaden our reach. We’re a pretty diverse group.

LOCATION: Brooklyn. Crown Heights and Clinton Hill. Our first office is on 198 Rogers Ave. We still reside there and that’s our community space. Our second location is our administrative office at 396 Waverly Avenue and that’s in the heart of Clinton Hill, home of Biggie.

CREATION: At the Combine, we build off of what God has created. We create art that addresses marginalization and differences in our community. We do podcasting and photography. We create solutions in the way of education. The kids that come to the Combine have all of the potential and ability inside of them; we simply work with them to build their capacity. We work to remove frameworks of deficiency and deficit mindsets. We work to expand the spectrum of belief they have in themselves and provide a community of support and believers to build audacious things. In the Combine community, our kids are building computer programs from scratch, solving real-world problems and bringing solutions to communities that struggle with being under-resourced.

We also create solutions to the migrant crisis that is currently an issue in our community. We have a lot of people, mostly brothers, who are here from West Africa and they clearly just need help and guidance, so we’ve created inroads to get them clothing and resources.

At the most basic level, we have our own breakfast program for the kids who come here. We do that on Saturday mornings, and we get a group of kids talking about a number of topics, from math to AI to what they’re doing on social media. We try to cover topics that are relevant to them and give them a roadmap to navigate this place. Another example of our outreach work is what we do with Crossroads, which is a juvenile facility located here in Brooklyn. All of the young people there are from 13 to 20 years old. They’re there for serious offenses, from murders to gun violence to you name it, and we’re teaching them to debate. And through debate, we’re giving them history lessons and we’re trying to teach them basic skills, from reading comprehension to public speaking. So we really focus on education through after-school programming. We have a couple of schools that we partner with. I would say that we are solution-oriented. We try to put our money where our mouth is.

INSPIRATION: Our inspiration comes from our ancestors but also from anger because of what happened to them and our communities.

We’re very sensitive to the fact that we were all once like the kids in our neighborhoods that we see getting jammed up, kids who can excel and go on and do great things. We have a vision to build a school in the future. Really, the way to get there is to just put in the work. A lot of what we do is address all the things that are missin in our neighborhoods. We want to make sure that we give our young people a shot.

For more info, please visit: bklyncombine.com