GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — As a three-time Super Bowl champion, Harry Sydney knows the determination it takes to pursue your dreams despite adversity. Sydney is the founder of my Brother's Keeper Inc., a non-profit that provides mentoring services for boys and men in Brown County.
He says he started the non-profit to give others something he wished he had growing up.
“I got the idea for My Brothers Keeper when I was about seven years old when I wished I had somebody to talk to," Sydney said.
Sydney first began playing football at the age of six while growing up amid segregation in North Carolina. While his father was in the military, he grew up in Fayetteville where he says he often found it difficult to fit in.
“Unfortunately when you grew up in the South you had to pick and choose different things," Sydney said. "Many times I was disliked by whites because I was white and I was disliked by Blacks because I wasn’t Black enough.”
Growing up he says football was an escape, a place where he could let out his emotions and only be measured by his abilities.
“Back in those days you couldn’t hit your dad but you could hit somebody else on the football field," Sydney said. "So I grew up that guy that was kind of angry but I found football as my escape and I also knew that gave me an opportunity to do more with my life and not be seen as just a Black guy.”
Football became his career. He went on to play for the San Francisco 49ers where he earned 2 Super Bowl rings. He finished his last season playing for the Packers and went on to coach the team, earning another Super Bowl ring in 1997.
“That’s that thing about teams and sports. That’s that place where you’re only measured in what you can do," Sydney said. "They don’t have time to look at the color of your skin, they don’t have time because if you can help us win then we want to play with you because we can trust you.”
When he retired from the NFL, Sydney stayed in Green Bay and made it his home. He founded My Brother's Keeper in 2003, hoping to bring a new type of program to the community that could give boys and men an outlet to express their emotions.
"I realized one thing was missing. A type of program to get boys and men to see that they may be going about things a different way,” Sydney said.
The non-profit provides one-on-one mentoring as well as group forum sessions. Their clients are referred by parents, courts, and schools and range in age from 8 to 83. In 2021 alone, the non-profit had 2,486 one-on-one mentoring sessions serving 572 different clients.
“We get to know you and in our process of getting to know you we get to learn signs and see things," Sydney said. "Part of our job as a mentor is painting a picture so our clients can see them.”
As head mentor, Sydney now helps other men overcome obstacles in their life in order to achieve their goals.
“We get to sit and talk with a guy about him changing the course of his life to become the man that he wants to be regardless of all the things that might have stopped him from being that," Sydney said.
