The West Harlem Art Fund has partnered the Harlem Chapter of the fraternal organization Alpha Phi Alpha. WHAF will offer internships to these high school students bound for college. The students will focus on social media, photographer, video-making and event planning.
The Young Achievers: Go to High School, Go to College is a young men’s mentoring and leadership academy collaboratively run by the Metro-Manhattan Chapter of The Links Incorporated, and the brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated.
Established in 1998, The Young Achievers was created to address the needs and help attack the issues challenging high school aged African-American and Hispanic males in the Harlem community.
By preparing these young men with life skills through our programing, The Young Achievers aims develop scholars and positive men to combat the media’s negative portrayal of young African-American and Hispanic males as well as help them make positive transitions from high school to college and beyond.
A Brief History of Alpha Phi Alpha
Since its founding on December 4, 1906, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. has supplied voice and vision to the struggle of African-Americans and people of color around the world.
Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African-Americans, was founded at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York by seven college men who recognized the need for a strong bond of Brotherhood among African descendants in this country. The visionary founders, known as the “Jewels” of the Fraternity, are Henry Arthur Callis, Charles Henry Chapman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle, and Vertner Woodson Tandy.
The Fraternity initially served as a study and support group for minority students who faced racial prejudice, both educationally and socially, at Cornell. The Jewel founders and early leaders of the Fraternity succeeded in laying a firm foundation for Alpha Phi Alpha’s principles of scholarship, fellowship, good character, and the uplifting of humanity.
Alpha Phi Alpha chapters were established at other colleges and universities, many of them historically black institutions, soon after the founding at Cornell. The first Alumni Chapter was established in 1911. While continuing to stress academic excellence among its members, Alpha also recognized the need to help correct the educational, economic, political, and social injustices faced by African-Americans. Alpha Phi Alpha has long stood at the forefront of the African-American community’s fight for civil rights through leaders such as: W.E.B. DuBois, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Edward Brooke, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Andrew Young, William Gray, Paul Robeson, and many others. True to its form as the “first of firsts,” Alpha Phi Alpha has been interracial since 1945.
WEST HARLEM ART FUND 