Victor Durrah
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For over 20 years, Victor Durrah has been investing in the youth of Spartanburg to help build brighter futures.
His mission began in an unlikely place — a class project. Durrah studied Non-Profit Administration and Management at the University of South Carolina Upstate, and was working alongside several of his his fraternity brothers to volunteer at the boys’ and girls’ club. Their goal was to give students who were aging out of the program somewhere to go.
The young men instantly connected with the work they were doing and founded Brothers Restoring Urban Hope, Inc. — commonly referred to as B.R.U.H. Mentor. They registered their organization with the state, and that was that: a nonprofit was born.
In the 21 years since the organization’s founding, they have served over 20,000 Spartanburg youths.
“We started out with maybe 15 or 20 kids,” Durrah remembers. “It was really small. We would use our paychecks to get pizza, and it was just something we had a passion to do. It was something for all of us that were a part of B.R.U.H. Mentor at the time, it was a way for us to give back to our community in our own unique way. And over the years, through consistency, after graduation we were able to conceptualize how the non-profit field works.”
Durrah is clear about the fact that the non-profit didn’t explode overnight. “We kept working at it year after year,” he says, “and we kept getting a little more serious and a little more serious, and creating partnerships, getting certified, doing a little more each year. Before you knew it, we were a household name, and when folks would say that they needed a mentor for their child, people would refer them to us because we’d been doing it for so long.”
During this time, Durrah was also working full-time for the Palmetto Council Boy Scouts of America as a fundraising executive. It was a role he held for eight and a half years. “Eventually, it got to a point where I left the Palmetto Council on great terms and started working with B.R.U.H. Mentor full-time,” he says. “And that’s when the magic really started to happen for us, because we were able to not just do what we could, but gain some community support to scale the program.”
Today, B.R.U.H. Mentor’s mission is to restore the urban community through group mentorship, leadership training, and spiritual guidance. They host after-school programs, free summer camps, teen outreach programs, and sports activities. Additionally, their Job Readiness Connected Scholar Program trains youths on relationship building skills and soft skills, helping 17-24 year olds learn about finding and keeping jobs.
With over 20 years of time and care invested in the nonprofit, Durrah says that one of the most meaningful parts of his work is to see students he worked with in their youth now thriving in adulthood.
“Seeing some of the youth we had when they were in the first grade now come back to volunteer with us and seeing their growth is crazy,” he says. “We just awarded a young lady named Olivia McCutchen, she’s a student at Converse College, on the Dean’s List…I remember working with her when she was very young, first or second grade, and now we’re going into meetings together. It’s so full circle. When you say you’re trying to build youth through mentorship and spiritual guidance and now those youth are 23, 24, 25 and you get to see the fruits of the work….you look back and are like, man, we’ve done so much with so little.”
Durrah says that the work B.R.U.H. Mentor has done over the past two decades would not be possible if not for the Spartanburg community.
“Spartanburg is one of the most collaborative cities across the nations,” he says. “When it comes to all hands on deck to make community resources work…we’ve worked with so many organizations and folks that want to see not only the organization do well, but our kids do well. We couldn’t do the work we do without Spartanburg. I don’t know that this model would have worked anywhere else.”
Durrah has lived in Spartanburg his whole life, and has dedicated his career to working in nonprofits, now serving as the Executive Director of Brothers Restoring Urban Hope, Inc. He’s grateful to call the area home alongside his beloved wife, Jeanice, and their beautiful daughter, Victory.
