Brownsville 'Abroad' Students Raising Money For Class Trip To Hawaii

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN —Spain. South Africa. Japan. And now, Hawaii.

Since 2017, groups of students from Frederick Douglass Academy VII, a high school in Brownsville, have planned trips beyond their imagination of what's possible.

"What we do through our trips is really just a much more powerful and potent way of exposing students to what the world around them," said English teacher Bijoun Eric Jordan.

Travel, Jordan said, is like discovering magic. And his goal is to make sure each student finds their own power.

Inside their Blake Avenue school, the students vote on a destination, raise money, and help plan their worldly explorations under the guidance of Jordan, who began the initiative he calls Brownsville Aboard with that first trip to Spain seven years ago.

It's a months-long student-led process followed by a week of travel that leaves students changed forever, Jordan said, in both subtle and drastic ways. He said that observing the process and the outcome is always "something that's amazing and inspiring."

And after the pandemic disrupted plans for a trip to Ghana in 2020, the city's Department of Education has finally given the green light for school travel — but only for domestic trips.

So the students voted and they picked the furthest place they could go: Hawaii.

And they still need to raise over $22,000 to get there.

Student Denaya, 18, is a senior now. She'll be the first person in her family to go to college, where she hopes to study cybernetics or cyber security. And while she says she hates planes, Denaya still can't wait to take to the skies.

"It's such a big experience," she said. "I know once I get there, I'm going to feel awesome for myself."

In about one month, Jordan's 15 students will board an over 10-hour-long flight to learn about the complex and often misunderstood indigenous history and culture of Hawaii through a native-led educational touring company called ReRoot.

Jordan started the program to help give kids in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in New York City an opportunity to develop worldliness at a formative age.

Denaya's family is already pretty worldly — hailing from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Haiti and South Korea (when she realized the depth of her Korean roots years ago, she recalled: "I'm looking around the house — this whole time I'm in a Korean household and I didn't even know!") — but she's ready to expand her cultural exposure.

Especially through the food.

"My house always smells amazing," she says of her parent's cooking. "Seeing another culture is like, how they cook their food and the type of food they have."

"I'm gonna roll my sleeves up and get to work, because that is such an interactive experience," Denaya said. "Travel with family is just, like, tourism. But this is really getting into the field and doing it yourself."

"I'm such a hands-on person that by the end [of the trip], I'm Hawaiian," she said.

These kinds of trips abroad might sound like something more typical of a private school in Manhattan or Westchester.

For Jordan, these trips are about expanding how students view their own capacity for opportunities and what's available in the world.

"I became an English teacher because I want to expose my students to the world," Jordan told Patch, "and with English, I can really take them anywhere outside the texts that we read."

"But what we do through our trips is really just a much more powerful and potent way of exposing students to what the world around them. It really engages them in a different kind of way — they actually get curious and interested and educated about what's going on in different parts of the world, they develop a kind of worldliness."

Another big part for Jordan is for students from his school, which is 90% Black, to see that travel, and the world, is open to Black people.

Like in their first trip to Spain, where they met with a group of Black expats in Madrid.

To this day, students bring up that experience to him. And in ways he doesn't expect, either.

Recently a student from that Spain trip named Bryen told Jordan that he had just changed careers and was now a chef after finding his previous profession unsatisfying.

The courage to do that, Byren recounted to his former teacher, came from meeting those expats in Spain, people who decided to make a major change in their lives and just went and did it.

"It actually kind of lowered that barrier to entry and lowered that sense of fear of the unknown for him because of what he had seen and experienced on our trip," Jordan said.

And one barrier to entry for these formative experiences is money.

For this trip, students are being asked to kick in 20 percent of costs themselves, about $770 each.

Some students who are struggling financially, like one who Jordan says currently resides in a shelter, got a boost when the school's staff started a collection to give them money for the tip.

But the other 80 percent of the cost comes from fundraising, like one on Thursday: an art auction called "So They Can Fly" held at The Brownsville Community Culinary Center from 6-8 p.m.

And a "Paint and Sip" fundraiser on March 18 at The Craft Salon in Prospect Park South.

The students have also held 5k runs and some take on extra jobs — past students have taken on work at law firms or at the concession stand at BAM — to get the money they need.

According to their GoFundMe, 170 people have donated over $23,000.

Now that the trip is about a month away, Denaya told Patch it feels like she's at "the end of a marathon," but at a beginning of a journey that she says will include even more travel in her future.

"This has really impacted me," she said, "I really love the fact that we can do this in high school, especially here."

That kind of inspiration makes all the work, which Jordan says is like having a second part-time job, worthwhile.

"I look at it as my opportunity," he said, "my one shot to show one group of students that anything truly is possible."

To learn more about Brownsville Abroad, click here to visit their GoFundMe page.