Broderick Crawford Community Research Partnership Award: Lifted KC

By Kelly Hale, Marketing & Communications Coordinator

Feb 10, 2025

One conversation with Devin Brooks, the Executive Director and Founder of Lifted KC, and her passion to help her community is not only on display, but it is infectious as well.

Brooks originally started Lifted KC in 2016 to help women with postpartum depression because it took her awhile to get connected with the right therapist after the birth of her son.

“Mental health and postpartum aren’t really something talked about in our culture; there seems to be shame associated with it,” Brooks said. “So, I wanted to create a space where women could be educated on postpartum. But during the process of going through training, I noticed that only women were in these training sessions that were also about advocacy.”

And that’s when Brooks started asking questions.

“I learned the training was open to men, but that they didn’t take the classes, and that’s when God changed my focus,” she said.

And that led to a change at Lifted KC to focus on Black and Brown men and young men, to build healthy families and healthy communities.

“We create safe spaces for them to have dialogues about obstacles that affect them mentally, emotionally and physically and really try to reduce the stigma around talking about it,” Brooks said. “We currently have two dialogue programs. One is for youth (13-17) where they have guided topics to talk about – what they are facing with school, friendships, relationships – and talk through those things.

“We also have a professional Black or Brown man in the community be a guest speaker to help with the conversation.”

And for the adult men, they have “Barbershop Talk.”

“We’re using a space that men are already comfortable with and are talking with each other to create impactful conversations,” she said. “We are changing the narrative of the conversations to fatherhood, what the truths, myths and lies about what a man is and what he should be. We also talk about co-parenting, child support, legal issues, and more.

“The goal is to build healthy families, but also to build healthy men.”

Brooks also hopes to roll out another program in 2025 that focuses on the different dynamics of the family, which will focus on men spending additional time with their child(ren). For instance, they will learn how to prepare healthy meals, and the father and child(ren) can shop for healthy ingredients together, make the meal together, and just spend time together.

“In our community, women are always with their children, but you don’t always see men with their children, and I’d like this program to let the community see men engaging with their child(ren).”

And as Lifted KC continues to grow, one of the events the Broderick Crawford Community Research Partnership Award is being used for is a men’s conference –The Men Heal Conference, which is a safe space for men to talk about obstacles they are facing.

“I’m working on collecting data on how many Black and Brown men are suffering from mental health issues,” Brooks said. “There aren't many men who seek therapy and go to the doctor which means men aren't getting diagnosed, so when we’re trying to get support from the community, we don’t have accurate numbers.”

“This award is helping us bring men to a safe space so we can start building a trust with them and having a dialogue so we can get the data we need to support these men, and the families. We want to bring down the number of incarcerations, suicides, and broken homes.”

To learn more about Lifted KC, visit their webpage.