Thirty-six men walked into a restaurant on a weeknight in Charleston. They came from different neighborhoods, different careers, different stages of life. By the foundation’s own account, they stayed for hours. Someone had made it safe to stay.
That is the working theory behind M.E.N.S.S. Cave, which stands for Mastering Empowerment ‘N Secure Spaces, and it is one of the central programs of BE Impactful Foundation. The program runs monthly in Charleston and is built around a premise that Deron Gadsden, the foundation’s executive director and founder, describes as deceptively simple: that Black men, as a group, are rarely given reliable, trusted spaces to talk about what is actually happening in their lives.
Mental health. Personal accountability. What it means to lead. What it takes to stay connected across professional and social divides. These subjects tend not to surface at a happy hour or a networking event. M.E.N.S.S. Cave was built specifically to make room for them.
The program meets monthly in Charleston, hosted most recently at Kiki’s Chicken & Waffles, with food provided by From Scratch Kitchen, a local catering operation run by Chef Trey Foy. Conversations are facilitated by Brandon Busby-Shaw, who also serves on BE Impactful’s staff. Attendance at the most recent gathering reached 36 men, by the foundation’s own count, drawing from a mix of professional and community backgrounds.
M.E.N.S.S. Cave did not begin in South Carolina. The program started in Houston, where BE Impactful has also operated since its founding. Gadsden, a North Charleston native, built the foundation in both cities at once. BE Impactful incorporated on December 30, 2021, and launched publicly the following January. It has since grown into a dual-chapter operation, with active teams in Texas and South Carolina.
The Charleston chapter runs M.E.N.S.S. Cave on its current monthly schedule. The program follows a phased roadmap laid out in the foundation’s planning documents. The first phase centers on the gathering itself, establishing the kind of dependability that makes men feel the event is worth returning to. The second introduces peer connection between sessions through informal events and shared activities. The third moves toward co-facilitation and mentorship within the group. The fourth formalizes a participant leadership structure intended to sustain the model over time.
The design logic is that consistency is doing most of the work. Trust builds through repetition. Men come back because something useful happened the last time they came. The format rewards showing up over scaling up.
M.E.N.S.S. Cave is one piece of a wider range of programming BE Impactful Foundation runs across its two chapters. The organization’s programs page lists a back-to-school drive, a literary initiative called Black Literature Matters, a self-care forum, and a holiday drive that operates in both cities. These run alongside M.E.N.S.S. Cave, not in place of it.
The Impact Scholarship, which BE Impactful launched in 2024, supports high school graduates in the greater Charleston area who are headed to four-year colleges. According to Gadsden, the program awarded two $500 scholarships in its first year, and two $1,000 awards in 2025. The foundation reports that both 2026 scholarships have already been distributed. Local businesses that Gadsden identifies as Black-owned contribute to the scholarship’s funding: Sweetgrass Dental Associates, the North Charleston dental practice led by Dr. Shawn Mitchell; From Scratch Kitchen; and Champions Phate, a custom apparel business also based in North Charleston.
The overlap between the scholarship’s sponsors and the people providing meals at M.E.N.S.S. Cave is intentional. Gadsden has described his approach as building community infrastructure rather than running isolated programs, a web of relationships between businesses and residents that sustain each other across different kinds of investment.
“Leave a piece of you in everything you touch,” he has said. The phrase appears on the BE Impactful website as the foundation’s guiding philosophy, and in the context of M.E.N.S.S. Cave, it describes what the program is actually asking of the men who show up.
Thirty-six came last month. The bet is that they come back.
