Originally from Washington, D.C., Dr. DeLeon Gray attended an elementary school on Howard University’s campus, which allowed him to see what community engagement looked like up close.
“Engaging with college students was regular from early on,” says Gray. “When I went to other spaces and started thinking about my work, community engagement just seemed so natural to me.”
Dr. DeLeon Gray
“They make all kinds of videos, mixtapes, and songs,” he says. “It’s scholarship in a different form.”
Black and Belonging serves students, ages 12-18, specifically emphasizing those who attend predominantly Black K-12 public schools. To date, Gray has mentored over 100 students through Black and Belonging in Durham Public Schools. Gray began his academic career studying motivation in graduate school at The Ohio State University. While completing his dissertation as a graduate student, he developed a framework for understanding identity and its relationship to school belonging.
In 2018, Gray and his colleagues won the Best Article Award for a publication in Educational Psychologist, titled “Black and Belonging at School: A Case for Interpersonal, Instructional, and Institutional Opportunity Structures.” The groundbreaking piece would eventually gain national traction, including being picked up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gray says he felt pressure to produce another article when a friend came to him and said that the idea was not done because the scholarship was just one leg of the relay. His friend advised him to show people what “Black and belonging” looked like.
“During the pandemic, I started to build out tools, engage educators in belonging working groups, and then when school opened back up, they invited me in to work with students during that quiet year and co-construct with them,” says Gray.
