Young Kings in Action, an enrichment program for sixth- through eighth-grade boys at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Ujima Legacy Fund.

The MLK school program is one of three grant recipients presented an award from Ujima at The Community Foundation on Dec. 15.

Tracy Brower, interim director of the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation, said Young Kings in Action was born out of a need to help young men at MLK better deal with issues they face in their personal lives and at school. The students meet once a week for an hour with several facilitators including Olufemi Shepsu, MLK Middle’s social worker; Christopher Moore, a student support specialist at the school; Dr. Ram Bhagat, who specializes in trauma-informed training; Zack Branch, owner of Mending Fences, a local small business; and Travis Woods, virtual enrollment manager in the city’s Office of Community Wealth Building.

The program’s 35 participants meet weekly to focus on study skills, anger management, physical fitness, and cultural activities such as the Drums No Guns program.

But Mr. Shepsu said prior to winter break, most of the sessions focused on a far heavier topic. “We’ve been talking a lot about the recent gun violence that has impacted the communities these young men come from,” he said. “We’ve also focused on development, how to become husbands, fathers, warriors and nation builders, because most importantly, we want to dismantle the school to prison pipeline.”

In the past, funding for the program came from Mr. Shepsu, other facilitators, and modest grant funds. The Ujima grant, Mr. Shepsu said, will enable the program to expand into elementary schools that feed into MLK Middle, and extend the program through Armstrong High School.

The plan for funds will include cultural and educational field trips for the students; workshops with parents; helping provide snacks and food for trips; and a program with business owners in the community to teach the students about entrepreneurship.

Mr. Shepsu said he specifically wants to take the students to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore and to college and university campuses.

“We want to expose them to what is happening to Black people outside of Church Hill, outside of Richmond,” he said. “We must be intentional about how we prepare young black males for the future, because the current dropout and incarceration rates are unacceptable.”

The Ujima Legacy Fund was created in 2013 by three African-American men in Richmond who wanted to create a collective for providing philanthropic support to organizations working to improve the lives of area youth through education. The organization has awarded $388,000 to 18 organizations over the past nine years. Funding priorities include after-school and out-of-school time programming, career development, college preparation, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, general literacy, mentoring, technology training and tutoring.