For four hours, some 400 teenage boys from the Bronx and beyond delved into the rites of becoming a man. They sat quietly at Monroe College’s Mintz Auditorium, magnetized by stories from men who’ve successfully surpassed that coming-of-age mark.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Monroe College Male Empowerment Event 

For Monroe College, which hosted its seventh annual male empowerment forum, the topic served as the spark to a way of life free of despair and emotional turmoil. It turned to success stories in the fields of business, criminal justice, and education to inspire that talk.

“What it takes to be a man is to recognize that you have responsibilities not only to yourself but to your community as a whole, so it’s being able to make a living but to make a life,” said Dr. Steve Perry, founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Harford, Connecticut who delivered the keynote address.

The college hosted a similar forum exclusively for women on March 31. This time,  38 male mentors in their middle and late stages of their career compared personal responsibility as a tool of stability. Mentors were on hand to prop up the potential of teenage boys, evincing themselves as role models of success.

“Good enough is not good enough. Not because it’s not good enough…but because you always could do better,” said Harold S. Reed Jr., a New jersey-based motivational coach, leading a philosophical talk on successful living.

It’s a lifestyle that could likely be tougher to attain when compounded by setbacks, according to organizers. In the Bronx, where single parent homes and incarceration rates for minority men are high, impediments can be tangible. For other young men whose lives are circumscribed by square blocks, the prospect of success is reachable, yet admittedly a crawl filled with possibilities.

That point was already learned by John Mensah of Co-Op City. A student at Bronx Health Science High School, John saw that consequences could follow one even after lapses have occurred. He used the story of a close friend that was swallowed by the prison system, was released, and found difficulty landing work. “It becomes hard for him for him to know if he’s going to get the job,” said John, sitting alongside his friend Joseph Amponsah.

But mentors reemphasized that socioeconomic barriers, while a hurdle, should not dictate the course of one’s life.

“Tying Into Manhood” served as this year’s theme, illustrated at the end of the conference when guests were given orange ties to signify their burgeoning quest towards manhood. They were certainly worn with pride by the college’s AimHigh Empowerment Institute, a group specifically geared to first-year students in need of resources and confidence building.

“We’re giving them an image and a hope that all things are possible if they concentrate and work hard,” said Dr. Cecil Wright, Monroe College’s dean of admissions, who also came up with the idea.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.