Harlem Lacrosse will honor Jim Brown at its annual benefit with the inaugural Trailblazer Award. This award recognizes his commitment to serving young people and encouraging generations of student-athletes to use education and athletics as vehicles for equality, justice and opportunity.

The benefit, which will take place on Thursday, Sept. 28 from 7-10 p.m. in New York City at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, will highlight Brown’s many accomplishments as both an athlete and activist.

Widely considered one of the greatest athletes of all-time, Brown starred on both the football and lacrosse teams at Manhasset (N.Y.) and Syracuse, before setting numerous NFL rushing records during a storied professional football career.

Brown has since served both as an advocate for underserved, inner-city youth and for the sport of lacrosse. Inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1983, Brown was a special guest at the 2015 World Indoor Lacrosse Championship held at the Iroquois Confederacy in Onondaga, N.Y. More recently in interviews with

CBS’s Sunday Morning and ESPN, Brown discussed his relationship with the sport and praised Hampton University for becoming the first HBCU to establish a Division I lacrosse program in 2016.

“Jim Brown’s career and legacy serve as great inspirations to our organization,” Harlem Lacrosse CEO Mike Levin said. “We are committed to ensuring that our students have every opportunity to reach their full potential as students, athletes and citizens and we see this work as an extension of Mr. Brown’s legacy.”

The night will be a star-studded affair for the lacrosse community. Professional lacrosse stars Alex Aust, Katie Schwarzmann, Myles Jones, Casey Powell, Ryan Powell, Dylan Molloy and Jordan Wolf, among others, will join Harlem Lacrosse’s executive board, its alumni host committee, Hall of Fame coach Dom Starsia,

Princeton women’s coach Chris Sailer and 20 other college coaches serving on the benefit’s host committee to celebrate Harlem Lacrosse’s impact and reach.

“Harlem Lacrosse exists because the greater lacrosse community continues to come together in service of kids who deserve opportunity. This is one of the most beautiful things about our sport and our organization, and we are thrilled that over 500 people from this community will join us,” Levin said.

To learn more about Harlem Lacrosse’s mission and unique brand of school-based intervention programming, visit harlemlacrosse.org. Tickets to the annual benefit can be purchased here.

About Harlem Lacrosse

Harlem Lacrosse is an innovative school-based youth development organization whose mission is to provide a safe, structured environment for children to compete and learn while they develop into leaders for their community. Harlem Lacrosse operates 20 programs in Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, New York and

Philadelphia and currently serves over 800 middle school students. Our year-round programming empowers students to achieve their potential and break the cycle of poverty by providing daily study halls, academic intervention and push-in tutoring, career mentoring, leadership training, admissions counseling and vigorous, character-building lacrosse to engage and inspire students on the field, in the classroom and in the community.

Through a combination of academic and athletic rigor, Harlem Lacrosse has helped transform the educational prospects of our students, helping them to set and achieve goals that often seem impossible for children from disadvantaged communities. Harlem Lacrosse student-athletes have achieved average core class GPA increases of between 5-10 points each year and our wrap-around programming has helped maintain a 100-percent graduation rate among our middle school participants.

Since its inception in 2011, Harlem Lacrosse students have earned more than $24 million in scholarship offers from some of the most prestigious preparatory and secondary schools in the country and our alumni have gone on to attend top universities such as Bates College, Colby College, Connecticut College, College of Wooster, Gettysburg College, Haverford College, Hobart College, Tufts University, the University of Virginia and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.