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Thank you for taking the time to consider donating to Hoop ‘n Holla’s efforts to prepare our youth for opportunities that can change their lives. Our goal for this year is $60,000. All donations will be going through our fiscal sponsor/agent is Community Resource Collaborative, Inc. a designated 501(c)3 non-profit.
Basketball used to be seen as an opportunity for inner-city youth to obtain educational opportunities that would better their lives. The hours of honing talents in the playground were the resources youth exchanged for scholarships to schools across the country. Unfortunately, with the increase in popularity of AAU Basketball, those playgrounds are no longer the places where city youth can find opportunities. The misfortune is compounded when you realize that the cost of AAU play is prohibitive for most of those would-be scholarship offerees.
Hoop ‘n Holla has been offering SIX WEEKS of high-level, cost-free training in the summer months to participants who have committed themselves to become the best players they can possibly be. That, however, is in jeopardy. In the summers of 2014 – 2021, we were able to provide the camp through a partnership with the City of Rochester Department of Recreation and Youth Services and the generosity of VOLUNTEER coaches who were simply tired of seeing talented players not receiving the opportunities that equally talented players were receiving in neighboring cities. In the summer of 2022, through volunteer efforts, we were still able to provide 5 a.m. workouts, but the camp in its entirety had outgrown our ability to provide it with volunteer efforts alone, especially after funding sources for which we were extremely hopeful, didn’t pan out. On the heels of a very eye-opening experience with funders, we were directed to the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. We can only pray that the issues within are not the realities inherent in Rochester giving, but we have become disheartened by the prospects of continuing to pour energies into the sources of our previous efforts to obtain funding.
Hoop ‘n Holla basketball is an outcrop of the City of Rochester, New York Sponsored Team I.M.P.A.C.T. (Inspiring Male Participants who Acknowledge their Choice to Transform) Mentoring program in 2014. Basketball was used as a tool to attract young males to the program. The bigger the basketball training became, the greater the engagement we were able to have on the participants in the mentoring program. While receiving consistent training and practice on the fundamentals and strategies of basketball, participants were learning for the first time in their lives about their cultural heritage that extended far past enslavement to the earliest known humans and civilizations. They were also learning, too often for the first time, about manhood from an organization designed and operated by the men who looked like the men they would eventually grow up to be. It was working; Team I.M.P.A.C.T. was having Standing Room Only sessions and was able to take participants on multiple excursions to cities like Washington D.C. (2015 Million-Man March and the 2016 opening month of the National Museum of African American History and Culture), Buffalo (Kwanza with Maulana Karenga), and Boston. Team I.M.P.A.C.T. was also invited by Temple University Head Coach Fran Dunphy to Philadelphia to attend a basketball facility tour while on the same trip being special guests of Villanova Head Coach, Jay Wright, to attend a Men’s basketball game versus St. Johns. As the program gained strength and began to have its intended impact on our young Black male population, the funding curiously was redirected and I.M.P.A.C.T. was ended. But they couldn’t stop us from volunteering and that spirit was able to be maintained through Hoop ‘n Holla.
Continued free training made it possible for many of our players (now including girls) to thrive and become some of the best players in Rochester as they had become among the very few who made the Elite EYBL CityRocks team in Albany. The success of our players was the only advertising we’ve ever had, and our participation has risen each year.
We maintained our mentorship character within the camp by dedicating 2 hours daily to classwork designed to connect academic, social justice, and healthy body learning to our youths’ basketball experience. Each day, participants have a set of three 40-minute sessions that convene every other day (Set 1: Mon & Wed; Set 2: Tue & Thu). Our main goal is to eliminate the summer slide that typically occurs academically when students are out of school for the summer months. Our most important goal, however, is to provide participants with life-saving information that is minimally, if at all, found in their existing education.
We have estimated that with all the services we offer, we saved our Rochester community more than $105,624 in 2021 alone. The funding we seek not only goes to providing the means to carry out six weeks of athletic components:
● Aquatic Workouts ● Sand Workouts ● Hill Workouts
but also academic, social, and nutritional classes.
● Imhotep (Math of Basketball) Class ● King (ELA – Themes of Motivational Speeches) Class
● DeGrasse (Science of Basketball) Class ● Sebi (Nutrition) Class
● Strange Fruit (Social Justice) Class ● Wooden (Film Study) Class
and Academic/Athletic monitoring throughout the school year that ensures that our participants are maintaining the academic standing necessary to accept opportunities as they present themselves.
Hoop ‘n Holla Alumni
2020 - Mitchell X Harris – Full Academic Scholarship to St. John Fisher – 3.2 GPA
2021 - Shaheem Ellis – 5’10” Sophomore Guard at Hilbert College – 10 pts., 3 rebs., 2.3 ast.
2022 - Lamar Lovelace – 6’3 Freshman Guard at Niagara County CC – 15.5 pts, 3.4 rebs., 2.2 ast.
2022 – Spencer Glenn – 6’8” Red-Shirt Freshman – Scholarship to Roberts Wesleyan College
2023 - Miles Rose – 6’5” Guard @ Putnam Science Prep – Committed Scholarship to St. Bonaventure
2023 - Turner Harris – 6’5” Guard @ Nat. Christian Academy– Announcing March 18th.
2024 - Damarius Owens – 6’8” Guard @ Western Res. Academy – Committed Scholarship to Marquette
Please watch the following videos to take a glimpse into the daily activities of Hoop ‘n Holla:
Thank you for your generosity; it is true that “it takes a village to raise our children.” We have a young group of players who are doing amazing things. We just want to be there to make sure that each of them can maximize the opportunities that their commitment to hard work is paying for.
Organizer
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Community Resource Collaborative Inc.
Beneficiary