Thanks to financial assistance from New Jersey SEEDS, a nonprofit organization that places high-achieving students from low-income families at selective day and boarding schools across the country, Brandon Jacobs and his three younger brothers were able to attend The Hill School. At the predominantly white boarding school, Jacobs served as the first Black All-School President and, seven years following his high school graduation, would return to his alma mater to assume the dual roles of Director of Inclusion and Diversity and Student Activities Coordinator.

“I didn’t have a Black male teacher until my junior year of college,” recalls Jacobs, who studied sociology at The College of Wooster. “To see someone in that role who looked like me was so powerful.”

Currently, as Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Title IX Coordinator at Shipley, Jacobs strives to be the person he needed when he was in school: “someone who would give me the benefit of the doubt, push me harder every single day, and meet me where I was.”

As before, and amid the ongoing global health crisis and nationwide racial reckoning, he remains thoroughly committed to bettering the lives of all students through the development and implementation of policies, procedures, and programs that sustain a diverse, equitable, and inclusive school community and curriculum.

“Parents are giving us their greatest gift every day. I don’t take that lightly at all and understand that it means a lot,” Jacobs says about students. “We have a long way to go, but I have hope and I have a true desire for Shipley to be a better place.”