Grant Bennett has a heart for the youth and wants to ensure he is creating opportunities for them to pursue science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) career paths.
Bennett has lived in Fayetteville, NC, since he was in pre-school. His father served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, and his mother is an educator who currently chairs the education department at Fayetteville Technical Community College.
In a conversation with AFROTECH™, Bennett spoke about his upbringing in Fayetteville, stating that there was a cap on the career opportunities that kids could aspire to.
“Fayetteville is not Charlotte, it’s not Raleigh, it’s not like a big city. There’s not big buildings, there aren’t huge corporations and companies in Fayetteville. So as a kid, you’re really limited in terms of your exposure in terms of what you can be. Most of the people we saw growing up were teachers, they were in the military, they worked in the healthcare field, like doctors and lawyers. Very traditional careers. So like there was no idea of me being anything other than what I was exposed to,” he added.
Bennett’s introduction to technology came through an information technology high school program, which allowed him to take courses and earn certificates from Fayetteville Tech as a junior and senior.
Advice From J-Cole
Bennett knew he wanted to influence community and culture, taking inspiration from J. Cole, who was also raised in the city. Bennett had appeared in the artist’s “Who Dat” video as a sixth-grader and later had the chance to talk with J. Cole while working at a local restaurant during his junior year of high school.
“Cole was real big talking to us back then about education … I got a chance to chop it up with him again as a junior in high school,” he recalled. “I told him I had an offer from A&T and Morehouse, and when I said Morehouse, he was like, ‘Bro, I just left Morehouse. I actually was talking in a psychology class. The professor was super dope. Like you should go see Morehouse and see the world, and if you don’t like Atlanta, you can always come back home. Go see the world, allow for that to help inform who you are and what you see, and then when you’re old enough, you’ll be able to come back and give back.'”
That conversation informed Bennett’s decision to attend Morehouse College on a baseball and academic scholarship, where he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology. After graduation, Bennett accepted a role at Google as a people analytics research analyst, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has since scaled to global program manager of external partnerships and experiences.
The Two-Six Project
Bennett has stayed true to his commitment to give back to his community. In 2019, he founded The Two-Six Project, an organization that aims to provide under-resourced youth and families with leadership development and community support through exposure, education, and advocacy, according to its website.
“My mission really is to promote true agendas of freedom. I believe that in my corporate work and the work I do now. I want to show people there’s no limits to anything that you can do,” he explained.
The Two-Six Project currently lives within the Orange Street School, which was established in 1915 and was one of the first publicly funded schools for Black children in Fayetteville, according to the City of Fayetteville.
Orange Street School closed in 1956, but was restored through a $1.6 million project aimed at building a community arts and STEM initiatives space, according to a press release. It was completed in February 2025 thanks to support from the NC Office of State Budget and Management, Cumberland County, Google, Microsoft, Dreamville Foundation, NBPA, NBA G League Miami Heat player Dennis Smith Jr., and a $100,000 Community Development Block Grant, per information shared with AFROTECH™.
The Two-Six Project is housed on the second floor of the building, in a space called Two-Six Labs, which also includes a state-of-the-art music studio, auxiliary room, community garden, and a forthcoming esports room.
Emerging Leaders
The Two-Six Project’s inception dates back to 2020, when youth in Fayetteville turned to Bennett for direction after the murder of George Floyd, who was also a Fayetteville native. In response, Bennet and Board Chair Brandon Nixon began offering informal virtual mentoring sessions. These sessions later transitioned to in-person, serving as the launchpad for the organization’s inaugural Emerging Leaders Leadership Development program, tailored to high school students.
Emerging Leaders offers leadership development, college-readiness, mentorship, branding, sports as a means of advocacy, and financial literacy workshops.
“We have a partnership with Bank of America where they provide what they call ‘Better Money Habits,’ which is their financial literacy course. All of our kids have access to understanding what money is and how to appropriate it,” Bennett explained.
Grow with Google is also a partner in this program, allowing students to receive education from its career certificates platform. 70% of students in the program are also awarded athletics or academic scholarships to pursue higher learning, notes The Two-Six Project’s website.
STEAM Scholars
Additionally, The Two-Six Projects offers a STEAM Scholars program, which introduces students to opportunities in areas such as sustainable energy, robotics, coding, and gaming, with the aid of TikToker Aaron Bowen, notes its website. Fifteen kids from E.E. Smith High School — a historically Black high school that also has a math and science academy, according to The Fayetteville Observer — are participating in the program, which also offers internships, scholarship opportunities, and mentorship with STEM professionals.
All in all, for Bennett, the key is to offer a wide variety of opportunities for students, whether that be a visit to the Google office he works at, designing Timbaland shoes, or a chance to mix music in a DJ class.
“I thought Google was a website. I didn’t know that it was like an organization with moving pieces and a real company,” Bennett said. “So I think part of our job is to showcase and give them the exposure to what can be, what these industries are, and giving them that foundational knowledge to at least know that it’s there. We do that obviously through our programming, but a lot of that is through travel.”
Other Programs
The Two-Six Project also offers a Sports Initiative, which includes free clinics, instructional camps, and the annual Fayetteville Futures, which gathers the top 40 junior and senior players to attend an All-Star game at the local minor league baseball stadium.
Additionally, the company’s literacy and mentorship initiative, Readers For Leaders — launched in partnership with Smith Jr. — serves 250 to 300 third-graders each school year across three elementary schools (at the time of this writing) and has helped students collectively read more than 5,000 books to date. The program offers incentives for readers, including free tickets to a Hornets game.
