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In the heart of Newark, New Jersey, systemic challenges like poverty, incarceration, and school disconnection weigh heavily on Black and Brown youth. But a revolution is taking root. Not a revolution cast in environments surrounded by concrete, but one in fishing lines, forest paths, and the fertile soil of shared heritage.
Hood Anglers, an initiative of Urban Seeds Grow (USG), is a powerful collaboration with Father Son Men and Boys (FSMB) that teaches nature exploration skills to boys. Together these organizations have created a model of knowledge exchange rooted in Gullah Geechee heritage, grounded in relationships with the land, and dedicated to fostering community resilience.
Adib Shakir, a Gullah elder from Georgetown, South Carolina, leads FSMB. Now living in Newark, his wisdom has guided over two decades of intergenerational healing and mentorship. “We are not just teaching boys to survive. We are teaching them to live fully, in alignment with who they are and where they come from,” says Shakir.
The Hood Anglers program is grounded in a deep commitment to land justice, cultural continuity, and youth empowerment. The partnership between the FSMB, USG, and Hood Anglers is more than operational: it is ancestral, honoring centuries of survival, land stewardship, and freedom dreaming.
Hood Anglers incorporates Gullah teachings that emphasize self-sufficiency, oral tradition, spiritual grounding, and ecological balance. Youth learn fishing not only as a skill but as a rite rooted in Gullah subsistence practices, like how to honor the water, give thanks before casting, and process what is caught with reverence. In the urban garden, Gullah techniques such as companion planting, noting seasonal rhythms, and the use of ancestral herbal medicine are taught alongside scientific principles. Story circles invoke the oral traditions of praise houses and ring shouts, spaces where elders pass down survival strategies, songs, and spiritual teachings.
These practices remind young participants that the land is a relative, not a commodity, and that their relationship to it is sacred. The integration of these practices provides a framework for resilience that connects Newark youth directly to a centuries-old lineage of resistance and restoration. This cultural grounding gives rise to a new kind of leadership, one urgently needed in a city where many Black youth face targeted systems that inhibit their growth.
In Newark, Black youth navigate an education landscape shaped by entrenched systemic racism, affecting their pursuit of self-determination (Schott Foundation for Public Education 2024). These communities are exposed to additional harm due to systemic effects on school resources. As a result, thousands of students become disengaged from conventional education pathways. Children are also affected by high youth incarceration rates that systemically target Black and Brown children, often as young as ten years old.
The Hood Anglers program directly confronts these patterns through consistent, culturally relevant mentorship. By encouraging boys up to age sixteen to build relationships with the land and meet with Gullah elders, the program offers them an avenue to learn to navigate emotions, build self-determination, and develop agency.
Recreational time outdoors has proven to have neurological and psychological benefits, including reduced anxiety and depression, improved focus, and a stronger sense of identity (Pressman et al. 2009). But perhaps most importantly for these boys, it offers a path to healing that’s not contingent on correctional systems or surveillance, but on community and ancestral wisdom.
The Hood Anglers curriculum is intentionally intergenerational and holistic. Sessions might include a morning meditation by a lake, followed by baiting and casting lessons, a lunch harvested from the urban farm, and an afternoon hike where youth learn to identify migratory birds and native plants. Camping trips become rites of passage. Boys hear stories of Gullah ancestors and are asked to consider who they are becoming.
On the water, elders teach youth how to approach fishing as a meditative and respectful act. They offer libations, recite prayers in Geechee dialect, and discuss the importance of stewardship and gratitude. These are not just lessons in technique, they’re lessons in ethics.
Every outing includes time for elder-led structured mentorship. In these sessions, youth speak on their challenges, goals, and dreams. The elders act as keepers of wisdom, not disciplinarians, helping boys develop self-awareness, emotional literacy, and a deeper sense of belonging.
These offerings help redefine masculinity outside of narratives rooted in violence, bravado, or despair. Black boys are invited to be caretakers of land, stewards of their emotions, and protectors of community. In a world that too often criminalizes their existence, this kind of radical reconnection to self and soil is revolutionary because it disrupts cycles of dispossession and disconnection by affirming that Black boys belong in nature, in leadership, and in legacy. Hood Anglers’ teachings restore to participants what was stolen from them: a relationship to the land, lineage, and sacred potential. This model is a blueprint for other communities.
The work of FSMB and USG is already transforming the lives of young people. But it demands continued material and relational investment. Hood Anglers isn’t a program to scale, it’s a model to replicate. Communities need relational intimacy, rooted practices, and guidance by elders who understand that freedom is built not just in the courts or classrooms, but on fishing docks, in dirt beds, and along forest trails. Let this be a call to fund, uplift, and join this sacred work. Our liberation is outdoors, waiting.
To learn how to bring a Hood Anglers program to your community, contact Bilal Walker: urbanseedsgrow@gmail.com.
