The Bronx built him. And Jason never forgot it.

Educator, Social Worker, Storyteller call it what you want, but for Jason, every hat he wears is stitched with one intention: to fight for his community and flip pain into purpose.

“I always tell people: I’m a macro social worker,” Jason says. “Everything I do is rooted in community. Bronx. Brother. Son. Healer. Storyteller. And yeah, hip hop raised me too.”

Jason’s journey reads like a cipher, every verse stacked with survival, bars filled with hard lessons, and hooks that always come back to resilience. With the Bronx in his blood, moved through foster care in Westchester, and coming back to the Bronx at 12, he had to navigate identity in motion.

“I grew up in a Black household in foster care, then came back to a Latino family in the Bronx. I had to relearn my language, relearn what being Latino even meant, while still carrying the Black cultural roots I grew up with,” he explains.

That dual identity, stitched by migration, culture, and survival, shaped his lens. And it gave him a mission.

Community as Currency

Jason saw firsthand the systems designed to cage communities of color metal detectors in schools, garbage dumps in neighborhoods, cops on every corner. “That’s not a coincidence,” he says. “Those are systemic decisions.”

It’s what drove him to study social work, and later to return as a professor, organizer, and co-creator of Life From the Bronx, a media space highlighting stories from the boogie down Bronx. Out of that came the Bronx Summit, an ecosystem for Black and Brown creatives to build, connect, and thrive.

Like Fat Joe once said: “Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.” The value Jason is building in his borough is about raising worth, not of buildings, but of people.

Hip Hop as Healing

“Hip hop is resistance, creativity, survival all in one,” Jason says. “It’s therapy to me, and I bring it everywhere: my classroom, my lectures, even community healing spaces.”

His lessons often weave artists like J. Cole and Nipsey Hussle, showing students a blueprint for investing back into their block. “We’ll study what Nip was doing, buying back Crenshaw and bringing tech to the hood, then ask: what would it look like for you to build your own school, your own community?”

It’s the same energy that birthed hip hop at 1520 Sedgwick Ave making something out of nothing, resilience on wax. As KRS-One rhymed: “The Bronx is where hip hop started.” For Jason, that history isn’t just nostalgia, it's curriculum.

Unpacking the Hard Stuff

But Jason keeps it real: resilience sometimes looks like unlearning. For him, there were three major boxes to unpack race and colorism, hidden history, and masculinity.

“Growing up, hearing colorist language in our communities, I couldn’t stomach it. Living in a Black household, it never felt right,” he says. Later, he learned how much that poison came from white supremacy.

In school, he was fed the Columbus myth but starved of Baldwin, Schomburg, Julia de Burgos. He had to self-educate. And then masculinity. “Growing up in the hood, we normalized a lot of toxic behavior. College and social work school forced me to confront it. To redefine manhood as love, respect, and vulnerability.”

No OG Left Behind

Jason worries about the missing OGs. “Back in the day, even the cats on the block would tell you ‘stay in school, don’t be like me.’ That structure is gone now. But if each of us just reached one young brother, that could shift everything.”

Which is why mentoring stays central to his work. He knows the stakes. Like Big Pun once spit: “Bronx keeps creatin’ it.”But creation needs guidance too.

Wellness as Armor

For all he carries, Jason doesn’t skip his own healing. Reflection, disconnecting when needed, peace by water, time in nature, and boxing.

“Boxing is therapy. You leave it all in the bag. If I miss two weeks, I feel off. Boxing brings me back to center.”

Why He Matters, and Why You Do Too

Asked what he’d tell a young brother questioning his worth, Jason doesn’t hesitate:

“You matter because we need you. Some of the most brilliant innovation comes from the hood because survival demands creativity. Dream bigger than your circumstances, tell your story, share your resilience. The world don’t move forward without us.”

From Sedgwick Ave to the South Bronx, Jason’s life is proof that resilience is more than survival. It's a reclamation. It’s making sure the next generation of Black and Brown youth see themselves not as statistics, but as storytellers, visionaries, and builders.

Or, as Fat Joe would remind us: “Nothing can stop me, I’m all the way up.”

And Jason? He’s bringing the Bronx with him.

Meet the feature

Jason Acosta is a proud native of the South Bronx, and product of New York City’s Foster Care system. As a macro social worker, Jason aims to inspire systemic change by centering identity and healing as the foundation for transformation. His work is an extension of his story, and he has an opportunity to share his story through podcasting, writing, consulting, curating events, teaching, and speaking engagements.

Jason has a strong passion for empowering communities by leading large scale projects that have a profound impact on communities locally and nationally, including the development of curriculum for young men of color that has been taught in the cities of Boston and Chicago, and research that has led to the advocacy of culturally relevant therapeutic services for youth in foster care here in NYC. Jason is also a member of the Soul Care Citywide Collective, focusing on alternative methods to traditional therapy.

Jason is largely influenced by Hip Hop and change-makers of color who have paved the way for others to share their stories. He is the co-founder of, Live From The Bronx, a media brand that bridges community to the creative economy; and the co-founder of the Bronx Summit, an annual event that brings together hundreds of creatives, and elevates the artistic genius of change-makers of color. His work has also been featured in various news and media outlets. One of Jason’s proudest accomplishments came last year when he had the opportunity to deliver his first TEDx Talk titled, “Reclaiming Your Identity to Empower Change.”