01 · Area of work
Community is the environment. Development is the product.
Most civic infrastructure assumes that if people get access to networks, information and opportunity, development will follow. Jeff's decade of building community led him to a harder conclusion. Access helps, but development has to be designed.
Human development, as Jeff uses the term, covers the whole of a life: career and purpose, wealth and economic mobility, health and wellness, family and relationships, leadership and voice, technology, and legacy. These are the areas where adults face their most consequential transitions, usually without a roadmap.
The institutional question is whether we build structured experiences around those transitions, with a defined outcome, peers working on the same problem, practitioners who have done it, accountability, and measurement of what changed. That thinking now shapes Gentlemen's Factory's cohorts, school partnerships and institutional programs.
In practice
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Built · Ongoing
Founded in Brooklyn as intentional community for Black and Brown men. Now evolving into a human development institution: structured cohorts, school partnerships, institutional and workforce services, research, and measurement of what changes.
gentlemensfactory.comBuilding · Ongoing
School-based programming built to develop confidence, career awareness and leadership in young men, reaching them before the world defines them.
School partnershipsBuilt · Ongoing
A data-centered study of where Black men stand on the indicators of human and economic development. It is the research behind the Gentlemen's Agenda.
Research & InsightsIdeas
Occasional essays and analysis on human development, economic mobility and the institutions we need next. No spam.
