Daily Points of Light honoree Danita Branam (left) with All Stars youth leader, Rene Ramgobin.

On Monday, March 7, 2005, Danita Branam, a founding volunteer with the Development School for Youth (DSY), received the prestigious Daily Points of Light Award, one of the country’s highest volunteer honors. The Points of Light Foundation was created by former President George H.W. Bush to encourage volunteerism.

Danita is one of the inspirations for the DSY, the All Stars-sponsored leadership-training program for inner-city youth. Since the DSY’s founding in 1997, Danita has been a role model, counselor, and friend to more than 400 teens and young adults, shepherding them through the program while working high-pressure days in the financial services industry.
 
Seven years ago, Danita led a team of volunteer adult executives who provided hands-on support to the very first class of DSY – and she’s been there ever since. Over the years, Danita and her team have helped to shape the DSY curriculum; recruited workshop leaders; solicited and secured paid summer internships from dozens of corporations and accompanied the youth to their training workshops. Danita was the first ever DSY Program Associate and the first Assistant Program Director. As APD, Danita works many hours a week as a career development coach, helping DSY students develop tools for navigating inside New York’s complex (and daunting) corporate environments.
 
Danita devotes her nights and weekends to the DSY as well, because, as she puts it, “the DSY exemplifies my core values.” As the program continues to grow, Danita works to introduce new adult volunteers to the DSY enabling them to play a direct role in developing young people.
 
For Danita, her leadership and generous spirit are second nature. "As a woman of color, I had to learn from examples outside my community how to handle myself [in the professional world]," she says. "I am happy to use my resources to provide a platform and environment for young people to learn how to perform as successful, creative adults."
 
The DSY is a leadership-training program for inner city teens between the ages of 16 and 21. The core component of the program is a fourteen-week series of workshops, led by senior executives and business professionals from major New York businesses who introduce young people to the corporate world and provide training in dressing professionally, interviewing, public speaking, résumé writing, developing interpersonal skills, etc. Each young person who completes the program is placed in a paid summer internship. In the summer of 2004, 134 young people were placed in summer internships in sixty New York City companies. For more information on the DSY, click here.