Jaylen Brown promised his Bridge students he’d raise Banner 18. One year later, they joined him in the championship parade.

Fresh off of one of the lowest moments of his basketball career, Jaylen Brown spent a week hanging out with Boston students. Haunted by a disastrous Game 7 loss to Miami, he vowed he’d do everything he could to be better.

“It was embarrassing,” Brown said of the 8-turnover performance. “I dropped the ball. It drove me crazy all summer.”

But hanging out with the Bridge kids served as an escape. The Bridge program, which Brown has described as “a summer camp without basketball,” is an opportunity for Black and Brown youth from the Boston area to immerse themselves in a broad range of topics, from community organizing to artificial intelligence. It’s long been the flagship of Brown’s 7uice Foundation, a nonprofit he started shortly after he was drafted into the NBA that is aimed at bridging the opportunity gap in communities of color.

Saeed Saeed, a 16-year-old from East Boston who participated in the program in 2023 —shortly after the Celtics were eliminated from the playoffs — said that it changed him forever.

“Those five days were probably the best days of my life,” Saeed said. “How do I put it into words? Those five days were surreal. I’m seeing people on social media, they’re literally right in front of me.”

The program partners with a slew of nonprofits, like NASA and Zero Robotics, and invites renowned experts from around the world to lecture and educate the students. Jaylen Brown spends all day, every day, with the Boston-area kids, offering them advice and connecting with them on a deeper level.

Plus, the food served was incredible, Saeed said. “The chefs were cheffing it up.”

Many of the students who participate in Bridge have overcome difficult life circumstances and made the deliberate decision to continue prioritizing school, regardless of whatever else they are dealing with.

So, while the rest of the world might have perceived Jaylen Brown as a basketball player who struggled in one of the biggest games of his career, for the students at Bridge, he was a hero.

Most importantly, he treated them like friends.

“He’s like that one cool friend you see in the hallways, and you’re like ‘oh, I wanna be friends with that guy,’” Saeed said. “That’s basically who he was to us.”

At the camp in 2023, Brown promised students he would become a much better defender, and vowed he would deliver a championship to the city of Boston. He urged them to come up with their own goals, and to similarly hold themselves accountable for achieving them.

So, a year later, when Brown was crowned the Eastern Conference Finals MVP, the kids were in disbelief. The Celtics were headed to the Finals, and Brown was fresh off the best defensive season of his career.

He was fulfilling all of the goals he had laid out for them.

Amanda Kuffoh, the executive director of the 7uice Foundation, said that throughout Brown’s dominant playoff run, the students couldn’t believe what they were watching. Their collective awe only intensified as Brown’s stellar play continued into the NBA Finals, as he played tenacious defense on Luka Doncic and sunk the game-sealing basket in Game 3.

“They kept reaching out to us saying, ‘oh, my god, he’s actually doing it. He’s actually doing it,’” Kuffoh said. “A lot of them were like, ‘I remember he told us this. Like, he literally told us that was his goal.’”

They recalled his mantra of FCHWPO – Faith, Consistency, Hard Work Pays Off. It’s an acronym he’s long repeated, and one that also doubles as his social handles on both Instagram and Twitter. He tweeted it out after the Celtics won the championship.

“He was always saying that,” Kuffoh said.

After the Celtics won the championship, she was flooded with messages from inspired students, many of whom had known Brown for years as they’d been long-time participants of the program.

“It was such a great moment for them to witness someone set out a goal, make it known, and then actually execute it,” Kuffoh said. “A lot of them shared how empowering that was for them – and how that made them feel like they should take school more seriously, or maybe they should join that team that they’ve been lagging on for a while now.”

So how could the Bridge students participate in the celebrations?

Amanda Kuffoh began to brainstorm how long-time Bridge program students could partake in the parade when a nonprofit called the Hoop Bus approached her.

The Hoop Bus, founded in 2019 in Venice Beach, had been parked on Causeway Street throughout the NBA Finals, brimming with Celtics memorabilia and games, and with basketball hoops attached to both ends. A collaboration between the two organizations seemed like the perfect way to ensure students could safely participate in the parade.

“The bus just naturally transformed into this symbol of equality and justice and peace,” said Gabe Hilt, a lead producer at the Hoop Bus, which has become a national project with buses around the US.

Initially, Kuffoh envisioned students riding the duck boat with Brown, but the partnership allowed more students to participate, while also ensuring that there was no drinking or smoking around them. Instead, the bus was filled with music, Celtics gear, basketballs, confetti, and even a swing.

“Regardless of which kids show up, we were going to make sure this was one of the best days of their life,” Hilt said.

Everything had to come together quickly; Kuffoh got on the phone with Jaylen’s mother, Mechalle, to coordinate everything while the Celtics celebrated Banner 18 in Miami. Not every student who’d partaken in Bridge could ride in the parade – the program has included more than 200 students, about 110 of whom are based in Boston – but the Foundation selected a dozen who had been particularly dedicated to Bridge over the years.

“And, we looked for students who we know are big fans of Jaylen, and who witnessed that manifestation happen,” Kuffoh said.

Students from ages 11 to 18 were set to ride the bus through Boston, alongside chaperones who represented the 7uice Foundation, Boston Public Schools, and the Hoop Bus.

“And then, some of Jaylen’s friends just, like, hopped on,” Kuffoh said, laughing. “But I was like, ‘hey, you’re gonna hop on, you’re gonna be a chaperone.’”

When students were informed they were selected, they couldn’t believe it.

“I was shocked,” Saeed said. “I was like, ‘What, me?’”

Arrangements were finalized late Thursday night, just hours before the parade.

“We were like, ‘okay, 9 am, everybody show up to TD Garden. Let’s do it,’” Kuffoh said. “And they all showed up on time with their Bridge shirts, ready to go, excited to see Jaylen.”

Before the parade began, the students attended a pre-parade celebration at TD Garden. Brown spent a few minutes with the students and let them hold his Finals MVP trophy. A few students took the opportunity to make TikTok videos with the trophy, joking they had stolen it from Jaylen Brown.

“He was just like, ‘I hope you guys have a great time,’” said MaKaylah Shah, an 18-year-old from Waltham set to study human-centered engineering at Boston College next year. “He was super positive. It was a super great experience, super cool.”

Her 11-year-old brother, Jack, could barely contain his joy when recalling the experience.

“I was so happy,” Jack said. “I got to put my hands on the MVP trophy – it was so much fun. And I waved at Jayson Tatum. I’m so thankful for the experience.”

As for the parade itself?

“Oh my god, I had the most fun ever in my life,” Jack said. “It was the best day ever – it’s going to go down in the history of my life.”

Photo courtesy of Makaylah Shah

For Saeed Saeed, seeing Brown hoist the MVP trophy was a reminder that hard work pays off

Saeed, one of the students who closely admired Brown’s playoff success, was moved by how Brown seemed to manifest everything he accomplished this spring.

So, like Brown, Saeed has set his own goals. In the short term, he’s focused on being a better person each and every day. In the long-term, he wants to be an NBA general manager.

“I know this is gonna sound silly, but I’m trying to take Brad Stevens’ job,” he said.

It’s an aspiration that may seem unrealistic to some – but Saeed has seen the power of hard work pay off right before his eyes. So, he plans on studying data analytics and business management in college, and doing everything he can to prepare for a world in sports management.

Jaylen Brown has helped him believe that achieving this dream is possible, and he’ll do everything he can to get there.

“He’s been very vocal about what he wants to do in the future,” Saeed said of Brown. “He has high confidence in himself and others as well – he’s always advocating for self-advocation. He puts it out into the world that he’s going to do what he’s going to do, and then being able to do it is just really inspiring.”

It’s only the beginning for Jaylen Brown and the Bridge Program

The 7uice Foundation program is currently engaged in long-term, strategic planning, determined to figure out how to turn a week-long camp into a more comprehensive initiative.

“We’re hoping to expand it to a year-long program, and an after-school program,” Kuffoh said. “That will allow us to form partnerships with organizations that kids may not have access to, and build a curriculum that isn’t in competition with Boston Public Schools, but is in addition to it.”

Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The foundation wants to increase capacity so that more students are able to participate. As it currently stands, the flagship campus for Bridge is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Brown has also held camps at his Atlanta-area high school, Wheeler High, and at UC Berkeley, where he went to college.

In addition to expanding Bridge, Brown and the 7uice Foundation are prioritizing the creation of a Black Wall Street in Boston, he promised he’d invest in when he first signed his supermax contract last summer.

“Once Jaylen comes back from heaven, we plan to sit down and talk about the logistics of it all,” Kuffoh said, referencing the euphoric high Brown has been on since winning the championship.

With Jaylen Brown at the helm, Kuffoh is confident that the foundation will achieve all that it he has set out to accomplish. And in the meantime, Brown has set a blueprint for his students to follow, instilling in them the unwavering belief that if they work hard and dedicate themselves to achieving something great, they will.

“When he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Kuffoh said. “That’s really key for a lot of our young people – to understand that words matter. You have to have intention with every single word, choice, action, and decision you make. They all have to align.”

You can contribute to the 7uice Foundation’s work here.