This nonprofit director draws on his own pain to inspire neighborhood change

One Friday afternoon, Brandon Cosby, executive director at Flanner House, walked from his office to a room down the hall, where children ranging from 5-10 years old played, colored in books and ate free snacks – scant opportunities for Cosby at that age, who says he grew up “poor.”

A child dashed up to Cosby soon after he opened the door.

He smiled and leaned over to high-five the child’s outreached arm.

As quickly as he arrived, the little boy returned to his seat.

Whenever Cosby, 49, looks into the eyes of the community he serves, a neighborhood often failed by “the system,” he said, he sees familiar sets of eyes looking back: his mother, who struggled to raise eight children alone; his father, who was in and out of prison; his two older brothers, who died too soon.

As a result, Cosby said he considers his work serving the near northwest side of Indianapolis “deeply, deeply personal."

He left the children waving goodbye and strolled a few feet toward the entrance of Ujamaa Community Bookstore, one of five major developments led by Cosby during his six-year tenure at Flanner House. The others include Cleo’s Bodega Grocery and Café; a two-acre urban farm called Flanner Farms; a full-service bank kiosk ; and Morningstar, the mental health center slated to open January 2022.

“Just be who you needed” – those are the five words that echo in Cosby’s brain, advice left to him by his deceased brother. Words that motivate his effort to rebuild the community, he said, and remind him to be the person he wished he had during his toughest times growing up.

Each hug, high-five, after-hours program and neighborhood initiative is an attempt at that.

“I see in my role at Flanner House as having a professional and moral obligation to leave no stone unturned,” Cosby said.

“It's time to move from the hoping and the dreaming and the planning stage into bringing things into reality.”

An uphill battle against injustice

Cosby grew up about 50 miles east of Indianapolis in New Castle, a town he said was mostly rural, mostly white and mostly an uphill battle against injustice for his mother, a single Black woman responsible for raising Cosby and his seven other siblings.

He recalled moving houses eight times before he graduated high school.

“My mom didn’t have the resources or the access to fight,” Cosby said, “she’d just have to go and just have to take it.”

Cosby too just had to take it, he said, once a middle school child on the receiving end of racial slurs, whose only response was tears.

Things changed when he met his high school teacher, Jim Robbins, who introduced him to readings by Malcolm X and other Black civil rights leaders, while also “harassing” Cosby to join the school’s speech and debate team.

He won his first competition, Cosby said, unveiling a “superpower.

“That’s when I realized I can do this. My voice can do this,” Cosby said. “Next time I have a racist encounter, instead of my eyes filling up with tears, I can be the person I was waiting for to come in and deal with this … And not only can I do it for myself, but I can do it for other people.”

He graduated high school, attended the University of Indianapolis on a speech and debate scholarship, and afterward, received a master’s in organizational leadership and education administration from Oakland City University in 2001.

Cosby spent the next decade working in education in various teaching, administrative and consulting roles. He joined Flanner House as executive director in January 2016.

'We'll do it ourselves': Cosby's motto

Flanner House is a non-profit, established by Frank Flanner in 1898, designed to uplift the social, moral and physical welfare of the Black community – a legacy Cosby considers with great responsibility.

“It’s a tremendous honor and a privilege,” Cosby said. “You literally are carrying history forward.”

Through the programming and services at Flanner House, Cosby hopes to build a self-sufficient and self-reliant Black community, he said; which historically has been “shortchanged” on the promises of America, he added.

His motto: “we’ll do it ourselves.”

Cosby said he once kicked a developer out of a neighborhood meeting, who he said told a resident in the audience that “beggars can’t be choosers,” after she asked the developer if the grocery store he wanted to build would carry organic groceries.

The next year, in 2017, Flanner House Farm was created, which Cosby said now grows over 30,000 pounds of produce a year.

On another night, Cosby was approached by a struggling mother who asked to borrow $20 to feed her children in the car nearby, he said. She told him she didn’t have a debit card nor enough money in her account to absorb ATM fees from the neighborhood’s only ATM machine – hitting him with “every flashback in the world,” he said.

Three years later, in 2019, a full-service bank kiosk was built by Lake City Bank into the parking lot at Flanner House, where withdrawals can be made in increments as low as $1, and the withdrawal fee for non-members is only $1.

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett praised Cosby’s accomplishments in a written statement to IndyStar.

“His impact is plain to see for anyone driving up MLK,” Hogsett said. “I hate to think of what might have been these past couple years without Brandon and Flanner House working for the good of Indianapolis residents on the northwest side.”

Building the neighborhood from the inside out

One morning, Cosby concluded a meeting with two women inside Cleo’s Grocery Bodega and Café.

On the walls, art made by Black artists hung for sale. Below, stacks of lemon bun cakes, red velvet cookies and chocolate brownies sat behind the counter next to ready-made salads and organic teas – all made by Black-business owners.

Cosby stayed around to hang out.

“It’s just an easy way to be accessible,” he said.

He looked out of the southern facing windows into the sunny cloudless blue sky.

“I'm proud of what we've done,” he said, “But I'm riddled with anxiety. I don't feel like it's enough.”

For Cosby, there is no end game, there’s only what’s next, he said.

After the mental health service center opens in January, the next steps are to expand affordable housing units, build a larger grocery store and add more retail spaces.

He said he wants to build the neighborhood from the inside out and use talent already here to create economic prosperity.

So that, “when people come to this city and they say, ‘do you know where there is a thriving, vibrant Black neighborhood,’” Cosby said. “That the near northwest is the automatic answer.”

Contact IndyStar reporter Brandon Drenon at 317-517-3340 or BDrenon@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @BrandonDrenon.

Brandon is also a Report for America corps member with the GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Executive director of Flanner House reshaping Indy's northwest side