GVSU Symposium brings national voices together to support Black men and boys in Battle Creek

Editor’s note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave’s On the Ground Battle Creek series.

BATTLE CREEK, MI — A toolbox designed to increase and enhance rates of life success for Black boys and men received additional tools during a two-day Black Men and Boys Symposium, which concluded on Thursday.

The national event, hosted by Grand Valley State University (GVSU), held for the sixth consecutive year, featured nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Walter Kimbrough, who does extensive research on the topic, says Dr. B. Donta Truss, Vice President of Enrollment Development and College Futures with GVSU.

“He shared how he believes and outlined what can be done to create better outcomes,” Truss says.

Other speakers also weighed in, offering strategies on how to be a mentor and how to employ this support to make sure they’re giving Black men and boys the best opportunities to be successful and feel a greater sense of belonging.

Truss, who has been with GVSU for six years, founded the symposium while working for Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, where it was held for the first time, and brought the event to GVSU. He says the gathering is designed to “make sure all persons who walk alongside Black men and boys have the tools in their toolbox to increase and enhance success, and making sure they have what it takes to bring forth this population to be successful from K-12, to college, and in the business world.

“We are always looking to add to the work so that all of us are being the best we can be, something that is outlined in Governor Whitmer’s 60 by 30 initiative. We are always looking at ways to contribute to that.”

This year’s symposium was the first held in Battle Creek. The city was selected because of GVSU’s continued growing presence here and the opportunities to grow the partnership between GVSU and Battle Creek.

During the gathering, Joseph Stewart, longtime Battle Creek resident and former Kellogg Co. executive and WK Kellogg Foundation trustee, received the symposium’s Action and Impact award. Stewart has been a champion for education, believing, as he said, it “provides the greatest opportunity to improve one generation over the next.”

“We have partnerships with Battle Creek Public Schools (BCPS). We’re working with the Kalamazoo Promise and the BCPS Bearcat Advantage,” Truss says. “This is a great space for those learners to come to GVSU to participate in the OMNI program and mentor them through their educational journey to earn. We’re making sure we don’t leave anyone behind.”

More than 500 individuals from throughout the United States, representing sectors like education, faith, and business, convened at the DoubleTree Hilton Battle Creek to listen, learn, and share ideas with one another.

Truss stresses that the symposium is open to anyone and everyone interested in ensuring that Black boys do better in school and their communities.

Workshop sessions highlighted data specific to high school and college graduation rates, college entry rates, and health outcomes

“When we look at high school graduation rates, there is a gap that we discover when we look at black boys not graduating at the same rate. The same thing is true for college graduation rates.”

While numerous issues contribute to this disparity, such as income inequality, a lack of positive role models and equal opportunities to resources designed to create success, those interviewed for a story in Forbes magazine cited a lack of Black educators.

Black children make up more than 15 percent of America’s public-school population. But only 7 percent of teachers are Black, and just 2 percent are Black men, the story says. “And that 2 percent matters. One Black teacher between kindergarten and third grade increases a Black student’s likelihood of graduating high school by 13 percent and attending college by 19 percent. For low-income Black boys, it cuts the dropout rate by nearly 40 percent.”

“Most Americans learn that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in schools. But we rarely hear about what else it did. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling also sparked the near-total dismantling of the Black teaching profession.”

Before Brown, nearly half of all college-educated Black Southerners worked in education. In the 17 states with legally segregated schools, Black teachers made up between 35 and 50 percent of all educators. But when Black students were supposedly integrated into white schools, their teachers and principals were left behind. Black schools were shut down. Tens of thousands of Black educators were demoted, dismissed, or quietly pushed out.

Dr. Leslie Fenwick, dean emerita of Howard University’s School of Education, calls this “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip.” And she makes it plain: “The wholesale firing of Black educators was not an unintended consequence of desegregation — it was an unstated goal.” The system that replaced them was never built for the students they left behind.

That loss was not just about jobs. It was about identity, safety, and belonging.

A look at health situations for Black men and boys finds them on the wrong end of successful health outcomes.

A study released in the Lancet journal in August 2025 said that “across the board, from research to supply chains to financing to governance, the first 100 days of the Trump administration saw worsening effects when it came to health equity.”

Even before Trump came into office, a 2024 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, compared to white people, Black people have worse health outcomes on approximately 70 percent of the metrics the analysis examined, including life expectancy and general health status. The rollback of policies under Trump, which addressed health equity, through legislation and executive orders, has left the most marginalized communities at risk as research is halted, community-care providers serving marginalized communities see their funding cut, and Republicans advance their all-out war on the American Healthcare system.

“If you have a healthier populous, the pull on healthcare is minimized,” Truss says.

The focus can be on earning power and creating generational wealth instead of health issues.

Success for the symposium is when “we bring a group of people together to have conversations and share best practices and adopt new strategies and thinking. Many of the strategies we talk about are applicable to any population,” Truss says.

Registrants are asked about how they incorporated what they learned at the symposium to further implement the knowledge they gained. They are also given a workbook that provides a deeper dive into how to be a mentor and a better colleagues and partner.

There is also a Call to Action that is different for each symposium.

“As we were going into this year, we are asking, ‘Who did you build a relationship with, who were you able to assist in going to the next level, and what teacher did you walk or talk with?” Truss says. “We call on them to not just come to the symposium but to be part of the solution when they leave. We’ve had institutions and school systems that have gone back and implemented things that have positively impacted graduation and completion rates.”