Hi Reader
What if the most powerful introduction to mental health came from a rap song?
That's a decade of Archie Green's life.
This week on Reframing Perspectives, I sit down with Archie Green — Founder and CEO of Peel Dem Layers Back, hip-hop artist, and the creator of the Cope Dealer program that's changing how Black men and boys are introduced to mental health. Archie has spent the last ten years using hip-hop as a delivery system for the medicine the traditional system wasn't offering his community — reaching thousands of young men who would never have walked into a therapist's office.
This year, Peel Dem Layers Back turns ten. And so does Archie's own decade of turning what he carried into something that now ripples across the country.
His thesis is simple, and it's structural: people heal in community with people who look like them.
A few of the moments we sit in:
- The viral 2016 song Layers — and how a song became a movement
- His mom's breast cancer journey, and the first time he saw vulnerability modeled inside his own family
- Day one of the very first Cope Dealer program — a school lockdown, a SWAT team, and what it means to hold space in real time
- The student who came in quiet and left wanting to become a therapist
- Words are spells — why he treats a playlist as medicine
- And the evolution he's living through now: from cope dealer to edutainer
This is a conversation for every changemaker pouring from an empty cup, every founder wondering what comes after a decade of carrying others, and anyone who's ever doubted that the way they see the world might be exactly what someone else needs.
You can learn more about Archie's work — and ten years of Peel Dem Layers Back — at pdlb.org.
A question to sit with this week:
What part of your story have you been keeping to yourself — that someone else might need to hear in order to feel less alone?
