Brandon Kennedy
Program Manager, Improve Your Tomorrow
This story is part of our July 2025 Young Professionals issue, photographed at Bradford Animal Shelter. To learn more about adopting at Bradford, click here.
Growing up, Brandon Kennedy always wanted to play baseball for the San Francisco Giants because of longtime franchise superstar Barry Bonds.
Eventually, Kennedy’s passion took him and his fraternal twin brother, Bryan Kennedy, across the country from Elk Grove, where they grew up, to Virginia University of Lynchburg, where they both had baseball scholarships. In 2015, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, it was time for Brandon Kennedy to do something else.
“Baseball did what it needed to do for me as far as paying for school,” Kennedy says. “I think I got everything I needed out of it, even the fulfillment of traveling and meeting new friends and teammates.”
A decade later, Kennedy, a 32-year-old Black man, is helping boys and young men of color get the same educational opportunity he did. Kennedy is a program manager for Improve Your Tomorrow, a nationwide nonprofit that helps young people transfer to four-year universities. Over the course of a few years, Kennedy has helped 25 boys do this.
“I’ve always had a passion for the younger generation and meeting them where they’re at,” Kennedy says.
His success is a guidepost for any young person who might struggle with the transition into adulthood. It’s a reminder that people don’t have to succeed in life by doing what they set out to do at a very young age or even in their first job out of college.
“These boys, or these wards of the state, want to be heard. They want a voice as well. And so I felt the need of giving them that time to be heard and meeting them where they’re at.”
Kennedy initially taught in charter schools before a stint with Improve Your Tomorrow as a college adviser. The nonprofit at the time was limited in what it could pay, so Kennedy moved on for an opportunity working for the California Department of Public Health. He also has worked in the California Secretary of State’s Office under former State Secretary Alex Padilla and current State Secretary Dr. Shirley Weber.
Kennedy began to find more of a calling in his work as a correctional counselor and officer at N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton.
“My main thing I got out of that was these boys, or these wards of the state, want to be heard,” Kennedy says. “They want a voice as well. And so I felt the need of giving them that time to be heard and meeting them where they’re at.”
Eventually, Kennedy’s facility was slated for closure. The department of corrections wanted to send him to a different institution, but when his mom suffered a stroke, he opted to stay close to home and returned to Improve Your Tomorrow in Sacramento.
The nonprofit contracts with the Los Rios Community College system, with Kennedy working out of an office at Cosumnes River College in south Sacramento and going to other campuses as needed. It’s a growing nonprofit with more than 200 employees and a presence in places like the Bay Area, Baltimore and the state of Minnesota, as well as other expansions in the works. Helping boys as early as middle school, Improve Your Tomorrow, which also goes by IYT, operates with the slogan, “Getting our brothers to and through college.”
The boys and young men come from a mix of different ethnic and familial backgrounds, some with two parents, some with fewer, though that doesn’t affect how the nonprofit receives them. “Everybody is treated the same here,” Kennedy says. “Some may need more loving reaching them. But we still need to show everybody the same respect.”
In his spare time, Kennedy has been pursuing a master’s degree online and hopes to eventually earn his doctorate in education. He also directs the Saint Paul Church choir in Sacramento.
Sometimes, his past and present collide. He recalls a time that he went on a two-day retreat for IYT with a man who was once incarcerated at the Stockton facility Kennedy worked at. Today, the man attends Sacramento State. “We’re just sitting there talking, breaking bread, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a full-circle moment,’” Kennedy says.
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