Today we’d like to introduce you to D’Andre Brooks.
Hi D’Andre, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
D’Andre: I grew up in Southeast San Diego where I navigated gang life and its stark realities. I was tried as an adult at the age of 17 and spent 10 years in prison. After my release, I became affiliated with Project Rebound at San Diego State, where I earned my BA in Criminal Justice and Masters in Public Administration.
Throughout my career, I’ve demonstrated an unwavering commitment to supporting youth and addressing systemic challenges. In serving as Chairman of the San Diego Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention, I drive initiatives to create safer communities. As a former juvenile justice associate with the Children’s Initiative, I’ve contributed to the success of programs focused on justice-involved youth. This has shaped my understanding of transformative justice, one centered on repairing harm in relationships and reshaping systems that perpetuate crime.
Currently, I am the Center Director for a drop in center where I oversee every aspect of program development, daily operations and community impact. My work blends strategic leadership with hands-on service, ensuring that young people particularly those navigating instability, trauma or systemic barriers, have access to safe spaces, transformative support, and opportunities to thrive.
I am also the co-founder, President and CEO of Freedom2Succeed. My co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Patricia Franklin and I met on the board of the Restorative Justice California, where we also trained and became certified in facilitating reentry programs for people leaving incarceration.
Patricia is also a San Diego native who has spent a decade working with kids in juvenile detention facilities. She has a career in creating innovative learning programs.
I grew up in San Diego and earned a BA in Journalism and Anthropology at USC. These disciplines informed my oral-history interviews with Holocaust survivors as part of a sequel to my professor, Barbara Myerhoff’s book, Number Our Days. Her book had been turned into an academy-award winning documentary. During this time, I also wrote for Newsweek, LA Times and the Oakland Tribune.
My graduate studies in International and Comparative Politics at The London School of Economics, were concurrent with my writing for The Economist. An article I penned for Business Magazine resulted in my being commissioned to write a nonfiction book that was optioned by the BBC for a drama series. This led to my forming a television production company.
When I returned to the US after a decade in the UK, I leveraged my writing, directing and producing experience to create a multimedia company in San Francisco. During the dotcom boom, I worked with game developers to create digital behavioral simulations with multi-tiered mentoring and collaborative virtual worlds. Organizations hired me to provide online leadership development, which gave me the opportunity to design innovative educational apps.
Upon being recruited back to San Diego in 2006, I began working as a volunteer with detained youth, mainly at Kearny Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility and, later, the Youth Transition Center. This decade of weekly programming flowed into my appointment to the board of directors of Restorative Justice California where I met D’Andre.
D’Andre: In 2023, we were leading a program at East Mesa Youth Detention Center in Otay Mesa. I always like to keep it real with the youth. One day, I told them about an incident that just happened.
An old friend called and asked me to join him in a dispute. He had been jumped at a funeral by family members who thought he was responsible for their brother’s overdose. I told him I couldn’t be there for him. My life had changed. I had a son, a position in the community and too much at stake to lose.
Patricia: I picked up on D’Andre’s story and thought I could create a role-playing simulation out of it; a kind of “choose-your-own-adventure” serious game with choices and consequences to help youth make better decisions.
Simulations can be very realistic and they are played in a safe environment. They started with flight simulators so pilots could get into a cockpit that simulated the real thing to test their capabilities without crashing jets.
In a broader sense, with their embedded decision times, choices and consequences, sims give you the chance to test-drive life without breaking anything. D’Andre and I worked quickly on what became the simulation, Under the Gun.
I had developed the Learn2Earn Scholars™ Program, a three-part curriculum that focuses on Self Awareness, Career Readiness and Responsible Decision Making (Game Dev Studio).
D’Andre: I had been working on a program to get formerly incarcerated, rehabilitated college students to mentor Juvenile Court & Community Schools (JCSS) students. These youth can easily get embarrassed to ask questions and a mentor can do that for them. Mentors can also provide valuable one-to-one assistance. I know this, because I am a former JCCS student myself.
As college-educated adults, the tutors can be genuine role models, because they have walked the same path as these justice-impacted youth.
My tutor project had gained the support already of Tracy Thompson, JCCS CEO. Our Under the Gun simulation was making a big impact. We realized we had created something bigger than the both of us. At that stage, Patricia and I decided to combine our programs.
The rest was serendipity: I was returning a group of kids from an Outdoor Outreach field trip when I bumped into a teacher who taught me when I was in Juvenile Hall. He was interested in our program and introduced us to the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) North Region Principal, Oscar Felix.
It wasn’t long before we recruited and trained tutors from Underground Scholars at UCSD and Project Rebound at SDSU, where I had been in the first cohort to graduate from the program. Our recruitment criteria includes them being completely off of probation, have at least 36 units, a 3.0 GPA, three references, a background check and so on, before graduating from our certification program.
Having them in the classroom as role-model mentors has been huge. The students appreciate how people can turn their lives around, get college degrees, give back and flourish.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
D’Andre: For a grass roots nonprofit community-based organization, funding is always an issue. We understand why traditional approaches such as feeding the homeless and restorative justice programs are routinely funded. However, we are not reinventing the wheel here.
We are delivering a cutting-edge program that had never been done before until the SDCOE took a chance on us. We rolled out our 10-week program at three JCCS campuses, tutoring 60 youth in Vista, San Marcos and Escondido. Lots of stats in our impact report validate our program, including that 96% of the students found the program meaningful and 100% teachers said they would recommend our curriculum.
While our trail-blazing efforts have delivered impressive results, unfortunately, when we go for grants, the people who are seeing the typical program applications don’t have the vision we have, despite the fact that there is evidence demonstrating our program’s effectiveness.
That is why we are thrilled about our new partnership with the National Conflict Resolution Center to deliver programming for the San Diego District Attorney’s Juvenile Diversion Program.
As you know, we’re big fans of Freedom2Succeed. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
D’Andre: Our mission is to reduce recidivism and disrupt the school to prison pipeline. Our program trains justice-impacted individuals to teach at-promise youth. Self Awareness, Career Readiness and Making Best Choices. They learn how to critically think their way through difficult situations using media arts technologies and Collaborative, Academic Social Emotional Learning [CASEL].
It’s about where you’ve been, where you’re going and how to get there. Tutors who want to give back, help youth explore better choices through learning how to turn their own lived experience into game-based simulations. In Game Dev Studio, they share their expertise so others can learn from them.
We call it The 3 H’s:
Returning citizens heal themselves by teaching justice-impacted youth.
They help the youth develop “choose-your-own-adventure” digital simulation games.
The youths’ voices are heard around the world by peers benefiting from their wisdom.
Patricia: The program uniquely positions young people not as recipients of intervention, but as creators of solutions—using storytelling, simulation, and lived experience to design educational games for at-promise peers.
Participants draw directly from lived experience, transforming personal insight into educational content that reinforces accountability, purpose, and pro-social identity. So far, youth have developed simulations on gang violence, substance abuse and social media.
It’s powerful when a 15 year-old who has over-dosed on Fentanyl and lived to tell the tale, authors a simulation about it and works with a team of classmates to bring it to life for kids faced with similar challenges.
Through this creative process, that now includes using AI production techniques, participants develop competencies in product design, interactive storytelling and entrepreneurship to prepare for sustainable employment.
By translating personal experiences into interactive learning tools, youth build professional identities, workforce skills, and a sense of belonging to their communities.
D’Andre: Patricia and I are both certified in the TREC Model that advances trauma-resilient education. TREC stands for Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities. Through our work, we deliver trauma-informed prevention and intervention: students leverage their own lived experience and our technical-skills curriculum to create trauma-informed eLearning modules for at-risk youth to download from an online course platform, the proceeds of which will go to the student creators.
In the same way, in our Adult Mentoring Program at Youth Empowerment, we teach adults how to channel choices to help their peers successfully get off of probation and parole. Their stories are riveting and we know they will engage learners who need to practice high-stakes decisions, where a seemingly harmless choice could land them back in prison.
Our programs mitigate risk because it’s all about testing choices in a safe environment and gathering wisdom shared by the sim creators. The creators professionalize their lived experience as they gather skills and even more freedom to succeed.
Patricia: We look forward to increasing our offerings throughout California and nationally. By virtue of the Internet, we see Freedom2Succeed expanding globally through the online distribution of our program simulations. We are excited at the prospect of delivering proceeds of the sales of the sims to the originators: those whose lived experience will be helping others around the world make responsible decisions. Involving mentors in our work and being able to scale our tutor training are other areas of growth.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://freedom2succeed.org/
