Thirty-six men showed up.
That is BE Impactful Foundation‘s own count from the most recent session of the M.E.N.S.S. Cave, held at Kiki’s Chicken & Waffles in Charleston, South Carolina. It says something. Black men choosing, on a weeknight, to sit together in a room and talk about mental health and community accountability is itself a statement. The nonprofit describes what happens in those rooms as the kind of open conversation Black men rarely have space for elsewhere.
M.E.N.S.S. stands for Mastering Empowerment ‘N Secure Spaces. The Cave is a recurring monthly initiative of BE Impactful Foundation, led by founder and executive director Deron Gadsden. The program started in Houston and has since expanded to Charleston, where monthly sessions have become one of the foundation’s most active areas of work.
The premise is direct. Black men have very few spaces that are both culturally rooted and reliable enough over time to build genuine trust, where conversations about mental health, identity, and personal accountability can happen without the exchange feeling clinical or organized around someone else’s structure. Monthly sessions are built around facilitated peer dialogue. Brandon Busby-Shaw, the foundation’s community experience manager, has guided the conversations. Men from different professional backgrounds attend. The attendance is open. What happens in the room is not.
BE Impactful frames the Cave’s design in three organizing ideas. Connection comes first, meaning the recurring gatherings through which real relationships form over time. Then growth, the kind of personal and professional development that comes from peer dialogue with people you keep encountering month after month. Then impact, the point at which those relationships begin to produce something visible beyond the room itself. Mentorship and community service are described as expressions of that third idea, along with school visits.
The longer model does not stop at a recurring event series. According to BE Impactful’s own framework for the program, the arc moves from monthly gathering to sustained community network, with members eventually taking on facilitation roles and becoming recognizable presences in Charleston’s public life. The gathering is the starting point. The network is what the Cave is building toward.
The Scholarship Thread
Running alongside the Cave is the Impact Scholarship, which the foundation launched in 2024 for African American high school seniors in the Greater Charleston area planning to attend a four-year college or university. The foundation says the program began that year with two $500 awards. In 2025, the amounts rose to $1,000 each, honoring Ciara Whitfield, a Charleston County School of the Arts alumna now studying Elementary Education at Furman University, and Leon Collins, a Fort Dorchester graduate enrolled at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in computer engineering. By the foundation’s account, the 2026 scholarships have already been distributed.
According to the foundation, the scholarship has drawn support from several Charleston-area Black-owned businesses: Sweetgrass Dental Associates, From Scratch Kitchen, and Champions Phate. Gadsden has described the goal as building ongoing relationships with scholarship recipients over time, rather than ending at the initial award.
Leon Collins’s path to NC A&T carries its own quiet resonance. Gadsden is himself a North Carolina A&T graduate and went on to earn an MBA from Louisiana State University. He grew up in North Charleston and founded BE Impactful on December 30, 2021, after years in consulting and DEI-focused nonprofit work. The organization now runs chapters in both Houston and Charleston.
At the most recent Cave session, Chef Foy and From Scratch Kitchen provided the food. Kiki’s Chicken & Waffles opened the space. Thirty-six men were counted when the room filled up.