Every young man arrives a prince.The work is building the king.
RPBK is a school-based mentoring and leadership program for young men ages 14–18, run inside Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Twelve weeks. Five pillars. One young man at a time.
What we mean by king
A king governs his own choices.
Every young man who walks into RPBK is already a prince — full of potential, not yet crowned. Becoming a king means learning to govern his own choices, provide for the people who depend on him, and lift the community he came from.
Over a single school semester he moves through a twelve-week experience built on five pillars, anchored by our federally trademarked Purpose Pathway™ Assessment. The program is voluntary, and it asks more of him as the weeks go on. The young men who finish have chosen growth, again and again.
“Reaching him at 15 changes where he stands at 30.”
The program
Five pillars, twelve weeks
Each cohort runs twelve weeks inside an eighteen-week school semester. That reflects what a school day currently allows — not what the curriculum can carry. A full 150-hour, 60-lesson curriculum is built and ready if a partnership ever allows it.
Identity & Purpose
Who you are, who you want to become, and the daily decisions that close or widen the gap between the two.
Financial Literacy
Banking, credit, saving, and building wealth — a working money mindset for a high-school-aged young man.
Habits & Self-Awareness
Recognizing when you are operating out of alignment with your own stated values — and what to do about it.
Future Orientation
Career thinking, life-at-thirty thinking, and the concrete steps that move a young man from here to there.
AI Literacy
Hands-on work in the major AI platforms, used to build real ideas, plans and pathways into future work.
Purpose Pathway™
A starting point, before the work begins
Before each cohort, every young man takes a 36-question assessment that assigns him one of four archetypes — a focus for his own growth. Asked directly whether the result fit them, every student who took it this year said yes.
First measured year · 2025–26
Nineteen finished. Here is what moved.
Nineteen young men completed RPBK across three schools. Fifteen completed the exit survey, which used a THEN/NOW retrospective design — each mentee rated himself twice on the same form, for where he started and where he stands now.
Mean change on a 1–5 scale, self-reported. Readiness for adulthood began lowest of any measure — the ground where these young men had the most to make up.
“It made me realize that I can start building wealth right now and I can make real change in my community.”
Mentee, 2025–26 cohort“A foundation and plan of what to do with money, how to handle it, and how to build from resources I didn’t have before.”
Mentee, 2025–26 cohort“A bigger mindset.”
Mentee, 2025–26 cohortThe honest picture
Most programs show you the finish. We show you the funnel.
RPBK is voluntary, and it gets harder as it goes. The early sessions are welcoming. The later ones ask real things of a young man — about his habits, his choices, his identity. Not everyone stays.
Cohort 1 · Fall 2025
A later cohort told a steadier story: fourteen young men started and eleven finished — strong retention for voluntary programming. Improving mid-program retention is an explicit priority for the coming year.
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The sample is small
Fifteen exit surveys, three schools, one program year. This is meaningful early-indicator evidence, not a peer-reviewed study, and it should not be cited as one.
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One mentee showed little movement
He started with low motivation and purpose clarity and ended in roughly the same place. He is the one who answered “Depends” when asked whether he’d recommend the program. He showed up, finished, and told us honestly. Some young men need a longer arc than a single cohort.
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These numbers describe finishers
Our outcomes describe the young men who complete the program — not every young man who walks through the door. Anyone evaluating RPBK deserves to know that before they read a single result.
An independent evaluation partnership is the next step, so future results are verified by someone other than us.
Ways to give
Your return is measured in young men
RPBK runs on donations. The founder draws no salary or stipend. Every dollar goes to the program: the graduation jacket, meals at every session, supplies, the year-end luncheon, and one Charlotte field trip per cohort.
Friend
Gives a King his crown — the custom graduation jacket a young man earns by finishing the program and wears across the stage.
Give $150Supporter
Covers a young man’s year-end celebration and his cohort’s Charlotte field trip.
Give $300Sponsor
Fully sponsors one young man, start to finish — the complete twelve-week experience.
Give $400Champion
Sponsors a full mentoring group of ten. Two Champion gifts fund most of a school’s cohort of 15–25 young men.
Give $4,000Gifts of any size are welcomed and matter. These levels simply show what specific amounts make possible. RPBK is an independently operated program and our nonprofit status is under review, so gifts are not tax-deductible yet. The return is a young man, not a write-off.
The jacket
Earned by attending 10 of 12 sessions and finishing the program.
Breakfast or lunch
A meal at every session. A young man learns better when he is fed.
Supplies & materials
Workbooks, assessments, and everything a mentee uses across twelve weeks.
Year-end luncheon
A celebration that honors each young man’s completion.
Charlotte field trip
One experiential day-trip per cohort, bus driver included.
The founder
Twenty-seven years watching it happen too late
I’m Duvale Murchison. I built this program out of twenty-seven full years in corrections — a career I retired from — where I watched the same young men cycle through the system and concluded the problem was being met far too late.
For nearly a decade I was a member of the 100 Black Men of Greater Charlotte. School after school across Charlotte-Mecklenburg put out a call for help with their young men, and I ran the WIN program on the organization’s behalf in answer to it.
Over four years WIN went into James Martin Middle, Whitewater Middle, Martin Luther King Jr. Middle, Mallard Creek STEM Academy and West Charlotte High. In the summer of 2025 I rebranded the work as Reinvent Princes Build Kings, and in 2025–26 RPBK ran its first cohorts at Hopewell High, West Charlotte High and Harding University High.
RPBK’s next cohorts begin this fall at West Charlotte High and Harding University High.
The foundation isn’t a curriculum or a metric — it’s love. I don’t have to know a young man to love him; I see myself in him.
Fall 2026
Cohorts begin at West Charlotte High and Harding University High.
Second semester, 2026–27
Five to ten Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools.
Fall 2027
RPBQ launches — Reinvent Princesses Build Queens, the same work for young women.
Get in touch
Come see it for yourself
School leaders, donors, parents and partners are all welcome. The fastest way to understand RPBK is to sit in a session.
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