The Bethel Institute for Community Development (BICD) - formerly Generation Excel Youth Development Program - was founded in 1992, its mission to “provide direct services and opportunities for growth to underserved, low-income at-risk and high-risk youth and their families.” After decades of operating primarily as a gang intervention program—working with youth trapped in the substantial wave of the gang-related violence that swept through Boston in the 1990’s—the organization altered its trajectory, and eventually morphed from Generation Excel into its present existence as the Bethel Institute for Community Development (BICD).

 

BICD’s mission is to provide the academic, social and emotional support for high-risk youth and families in Greater Boston in ways that measurably transform their lives and communities in which they live. The Institute’s focus has developed into achieving a fully-formed community membership, endeavoring to re-weave the entire fabric of its participants and their communities by:

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- Furnishing necessary support services

- Bolstering the overall community-building capacity for its developing youth members...

- Enabling them to change their lives by following a path to success they themselves helped chart

- Reach back into our neighborhoods to share, teach, grow, and help others realize a bright, hopeful future