Dickens’ Big Brothers Fishing Retreat Returns to Adams Park for Fourth Year

When most people picture a fisherman, the image that comes to mind rarely includes young Black boys. Mayor Andre Dickens’ Big Brothers Fishing Retreat is working to change that. 

On a spring Saturday morning at Adams Park, young men cast their lines into a stocked pond as Mayor Andre Dickens’ Big Brothers Fishing Retreat returned for its fourth consecutive year, drawing together city agencies, state conservation experts and community volunteers around a shared mission: getting the youth of Atlanta outside, engaged and equipped with life skills that extend well beyond the water’s edge.

Open to young men ages 12 to 2, taking place at Adams Park in partnership with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Partners included Atlanta Fire Rescue, the Atlanta Police Department, and Atlanta Parks and Recreation.

Now in its fourth year, the event began as a safe harbor for youth in the area, brought to life shortly after Mayor Dickens took office as one of his signature community initiatives. Like midnight basketball, it was designed to replace idle time with structured, purposeful activity. “We started out with 25 kids,” said Demetrius McCray, Deputy Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Constituent Services. “We have registered this year 160, and it has just grown.”

“One of the things that the mayor wanted to make sure is that we kept crime down,” McCray said. “This is just allowing young men to just not have idle time. This is an opportunity for them to get up on a Saturday morning, get started, get moving.”

Beyond fishing instruction, participants heard from licensed mental health practitioners throughout the morning. McCray said walking boys through stress-relief techniques and the patience required by fishing was intentional, a way of drawing a line between the sport and broader emotional wellness.

Michael Sellers, Community Fishing Coordinator with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, has been stocking the Adams Park pond with catchable catfish and bream for six years and has attended the retreat every year since its launch. A native Atlantan, Sellers joined the DNR in 2012 and now works across all 159 Georgia counties through the agency’s Gateway to Fishing program, with a focus on urban communities where access to outdoor resources is often least visible.

“If you catch them young, they become lovers of fishing,” Sellers said. “If you don’t expose them to fishing, they will never know about fishing.”

Sellers noted that children under 16 do not need a fishing license in Georgia, meaning any young person can walk to a neighborhood pond and start fishing without barrier. His team also runs adaptive fishing programs for participants with handicap and special education needs, with accessible lakes throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Among those on hand was Joshua T. Ali, a former Atlanta Falcons Wide Receiver who wrote about his love of fishing and turned children’s book author from Miami, who came to the retreat because his father’s company, Keen Water, was sponsoring the event. Ali released “Young Joshua’s Big Adventure” in August 2022, a series drawn from his own childhood memories of fishing with his father after football practice.

“Fish has just always been a part of me,” Ali said. “This book is not necessarily showing people how to fish, but my first experience fishing, catching the fish.”

Watching children reel in their first catches, Ali said the scene resonated personally.

“It’s great just to see these kids outside again,” he said. “Video games and phones and computers kind of took over everything, but it’s good to see everybody come outside and learn something new.”

McCray said the office is already planning to expand the retreat next year, with hopes of bringing a second event to Piedmont Park, which also features a lake within the city of Atlanta park system.

“The community loves it,” he said. “The kids love it. They love the life skill portion of it, and it is just growing every year.”

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