Youth development has been a driving force in Shirley Edgerton’s life for as long as she can remember — one motivated by female role models who lit a fire within her.

“As a teenager, my mentors identified leadership qualities in me that I didn’t see,” Shirley said, pointing to opportunities — from travel to training — her family could not afford to support but that women from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church she attended made possible.

For those women who shaped her, Shirley is paying it forward. She first arrived in the Berkshires when her late husband, the Bishop Jerome T. Edgerton Sr., was called to pastor the Second Congregational Church in Pittsfield. “We thought it was a great place to raise children,” she recalled of an intentional decision to remain in the region. A second such decision — to expose her three young children to the rewards of community activism —has endured over three decades, leaving a mark on too many lives to count.

“It all began with Youth Alive,” said Shirley recently, describing a journey her daughter Akilah and friend Erica Young took to turn an interest in stepping — a dance tradition popular at historically Black colleges and universities — into a multicultural, community-based arts program.

First performing at church (“The young people in the church were just awestruck,” Shirley remembered), the two were soon asked to participate in a local African American festival. The girls then realized they could help fill a gap in programs focused on developing self-esteem in Berkshire County’s young people of color by founding Youth Alive Step, Dance and Drum Band.

As the program grew, Shirley, who has a social work background and served as founding director, saw a need to go beyond performances to help participants “understand that college is a possibility within their reach.” Without knowing how she would fund it, she organized a trip to several HBCUs in North Carolina to dispel the doubts these young people were expressing about the existence of such institutions. “If you can see yourself in a classroom, you can see yourself as a professor or a president of a college,” Shirley said.

A new chapter in her leadership began while she was serving on the board of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts. Shirley was invited to participate in an intensive program designed to prepare women of color to be philanthropists. “It was pretty incredible,” she said of the nine-month program, which allowed her to develop an initiative from which the community at large would benefit: the Women of Color Giving Circle.

Fifty community members turned out for the circle’s inaugural meeting in 2004. They heard her case that supporting young women of color — from girlhood until womanhood — would require new programming and funding. They developed a mission that very day: “To provide a resource for young girls and women of color which seeks to inspire, mentor, and enhance their lives through educational, social and spiritual development, while fostering dignity, confidence, self-respect, reliance and resilience.”

Youth Alive had produced critical insights for this work. Prior to performances, Shirley noticed the young men were focused and feeling good about themselves while the girls were uneasy. “I got the sense they didn’t feel their role as steppers was as valuable as the drummers,” she said.

R.O.P.E., or the Rites of Passage and Empowerment program, was born in 2010, when a group of 15 girls began convening for bimonthly meetings with a variety of experienced local professionals. Soon, the participants persuaded these mentors to run the program year-round.

Since then, R.O.P.E. has matured into a mentoring program with proven impact for young women of color and those who identify as female or non-binary. Its mission is to celebrate and honor the entry of adolescents into adulthood and provide them with skills and knowledge that they need to be successful, independent and responsible people.

R.O.P.E. helps participants discover their inner voice and supports all components of personal development and personal leadership, with an emphasis on college readiness, exposure to career opportunities and cultural exploration through biennial mission trips to Africa.

Last year, R.O.P.E. established a designated fund with BTCF — to harness the power of Shirley’s philanthropy and traditions of giving, and the influence of her earliest cheerleaders: her grandmother and the women at the church of her youth.

In many ways, her story has come full circle.