Why Baltimore?

Some Notes from the Open Society Institute about the Community of Baltimore

Open Society Institute

Baltimore's Notes

Monday, June 14, 2010 at 8:30am


In Maryland more than 207,000 children are at risk for hunger. The same number of young people are unsupervised during the after-school hours. The child who goes home to an empty house is likely to be the same child who may not have access to food between the end of the school day and the next morning.

Maryland is fortunate to be one of the 13 states (plus the District of Columbia) that has the At-Risk Snack and Supper Program. This program provides federal funds to serve nutritious meals and snacks in after-school programs in areas served by a public school where at least 50 percent of enrolled children are eligible for free or reduced meals. The Snack and Supper Program was implemented this year at more than 40 Family League of Baltimore City funded sites with great results. Programs offering supper have seen increased recruitment, attendance and retention, and parents have expressed appreciation for not having to scramble to feed students after a long day.

In a recent visit to the Higher Achievement Program at Ashburton Elementary/Middle School I saw the supper program in action. Chicken Masala was on the menu (more exotic than the average cafeteria fare) and plates were filled to the brim with many kids coming back for seconds. After dinner, participants moved with enthusiasm into their study halls, elective classes, and then to the community meeting and mentoring sessions. Full bodies and full minds—just the way it should be.

My audacious idea is that we expand the At-Risk Snack and Supper Program by offering high quality after-school programs at every eligible school, church and community center. With more investment in after-school programming, youth who face food insecurity will be served free meals (with federal resources) AND participate in programming that research shows will improve school performance, attendance, and engagement—all key precursors for school completion and ongoing success.

Monday, June 7, 2010 at 8:30am

Let’s give every student the chance to write and produce a play. This can happen in the language arts classroom or as part of an after-school program. The important part is that students are in charge, from brainstorming to production night.

Students crave opportunities to express themselves, and theater offers a constructive outlet for the classroom. Theater presents a perfect hybrid of possibilities for academic learning and student fun. It also allows students to guide the creative process, beginning with an idea and seeing their writing through an initial draft, revisions, rewrites, and a final product. Theater is a cooperative art form, and the social benefits of bringing students together to create and perform plays extend beyond the classroom into many areas of students’ lives.

Last month, the 8th grade writing workshop I teach at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School wrote a play called “The Day Baltimore Ran Out of Chicken.” It grew out of a simple writing exercise. Each student received a note card with an item written on it, and they were to imagine that Baltimore had run out of that item. Baltimore without tires? Sidewalks? Sugar? Churches? Bus drivers? How about chicken? They read their stories aloud, and I challenged them to take it up a notch, thinking catastrophically. They re-wrote their paragraphs as catastrophes—with explosions at the end times. Chicken was the worst. So bad, in fact, they wrote a play about it. Wrote, assigned roles, and created the sets. They’ll perform it this Wednesday. In the end, they decided that a fictional Sheila Dixon steals all the chicken.

Students were captivated with every part of the process. Their classroom teacher emailed me to say that they couldn’t stop talking about a Baltimore without chicken. Every week, the students would greet me with new ideas. They wanted to incorporate technology into their play and pre-record the newscasts. They hope to turn the story into a comic strip, novel, opera, or television show. They’re in love with their idea and more engaged than I’ve ever seen them.

Writers in Baltimore Schools constantly strive to narrow the gap between what schools value and what youth find important in their lives. We’ve struck a goldmine with theater. Next school year, we will launch a Theater Club. Small groups of students will write, cast, design sets, rehearse, and perform two plays per year under the guidance of a Johns Hopkins theater student.

Let’s think about how we can do the same across Baltimore. Throughout the city, there are hundreds of individuals passionate about theater, and their talents could be put to good work with students. Talk to the school in your area. Talk to your local rec center. Talk to us. We’d love you to join us in giving every student the chance to write and produce a play.


Monday, May 24, 2010 at 7:30am

Since 2005, I have been an active member of the Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition, which helps Baltimore residents address the potential loss of their home to foreclosure. We recognized the problem early, and mobilized to get the message out to people in mortgage trouble that they should seek help from a nonprofit housing counselor.

The good news is that housing counselors have helped thousands of people avoid foreclosure. Our coalition has distributed brochures throughout Baltimore to let renters know that they have rights if their landlord is foreclosed on. However, the fight against foreclosure also has been humbling, because the crisis has affected many more people, and lasted much longer, than we originally had thought it would.

The difficult truth is that Baltimore, like cities across America, is vulnerable to not only economic but also environmental and political crises. Given the realities of economic interdependence, global warming, and international terrorism, we should be making resilience—the ability to respond to crises and adapt effectively—a core principle in our work with families and neighborhoods.

This is a call for hope and action, not fear and defensiveness. As the authors of the book Resilient Cities emphasize, “Resilience is built on hope…cities require an inner strength, a resolve, as well as a strong physical infrastructure and built environment.” A city like Baltimore requires a shared understanding across diverse communities of why resilience matters, and a commitment to increasing resilience over time.

Baltimore has taken important steps in this direction. The city’s Sustainability Plan outlines how we can achieve environmental resilience on diverse fronts. Our foreclosure coalition has demonstrated how a committed group of nonprofit, foundation, public sector, and for-profit partners can respond flexibly to a stubborn crisis. We can and should build on collective efforts to make our city more resilient.


Monday, May 17, 2010 at 7:30am


Imagine listening to members of Congress making statements like the following:

* “One look at the current budget will show the large amount of money needed to pay for defaulted loans—about $1.4 billion for just one year alone. The amounts expended over the past 5 years for defaults have risen by 85 percent.”
* “During the most recent fiscal year, the federal government has estimated that Federal default costs exceeded 40 percent of the obligations for the entire federally insured Loan Program. The $1.5 billion the Federal Government paid last year in defaults was the third highest expense incurred by the federal agency in charge of the program.”

At first blush you might think these statements were from the recent Goldman Sachs hearing on the Capitol Hill. However, these statements evolved from another crisis more than twenty years ago involving federal student loan programs. In the student loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, many predatory and for-profit career schools fleeced the federal government through fraudulent and deceptive education practices, which saddled students with unmanageable student loan debt and bogus educational credentials that did not lead to employment. The results were devastating to individuals, families, and taxpayers. And like today, student loan lenders were not significantly affected since the government and taxpayers guaranteed all the loans and created a no risk system for lenders funding the fraud and abuse.

In 1989 as a result of the massive student loan abuse, Congress did not just bail out the lenders. Congress also created mandatory minimum thresholds for schools and lenders to participate in the federal student loan program. For example, Congress enacted a maximum default rate for schools and lenders seeking the right to continue participating in the program. In other words, in order to have the privilege of participating in the federal student loan program, the default rates of schools and lenders were tracked and reported annually for the first time. Those schools and lenders with unacceptable default rates would lose their right to issue federally insured student loans. As a result of these requirements, the government was able to weed out the “bad apples,” and now, over twenty years later, the overall default rates for federal student loans have dropped from 22.4% in 1992 to just 6.7% in 2007.

Given the present mortgage meltdown and negative consequences it has created on the economy, families, communities, and others, it should be obvious to decision makers that the privilege of a mortgage lender/broker license from Maryland or even the federal government needs to be reconsidered. Why should lenders, brokers, or loan officers with exceedingly high default rates be allowed the privilege of a license from our government and continue to operate if they are just churning out loans that are not affordable and will only fail? We know from the lessons of the past that effectively regulating these lenders is not overly complicated. All the government needs to do is track and publish default data and revoke the licenses of predatory mortgage lenders, brokers, and loan officers whose business practices result in unacceptable default levels. If we have learned noting else about the economic crisis of the last two years, we have to agree that a mortgage lender license is a privilege not a right.

Monday, May 10, 2010 at 7:30am

Black community, it’s time for some tough decision-making. It’s time to decide the best way to conceptualize, create and configure our communities for optimal socio-economic outcomes. Moreover, it’s time for us to promote and demonstrate by example that “more is not always better,” and that there comes a time when it is necessary to downsize and scale back to salvage, strengthen and support those existing organizations and businesses that stand the “best” chance of surviving present and future economic realities. Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges as a community. It is time to disconnect ourselves from the last sequential obsession with the politics of divisiveness and whatever relative triviality that dominates our conversation.

Given the present economic realities, one can only ponder why there have not been more mergers of black not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, colleges, churches and businesses in the Baltimore region in particular, and across the nation in general. News headlines appear each and everyday about the dire and precipitous decline of black businesses, historically black colleges, and not-for-profit organizations. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that the black community has adopted a “more is better” approach to address its present conditions. If we really looked critically at our situation and removed our emotions and egos from the equation, we would realize that we have far too many businesses, churches, colleges and not-for-profit organizations that are on life-support and whose days are numbered. We would realize that far too many of these “life-sustaining” institutions are duplicating services, that they seldom collaborate with one another on any major projects, and that they are led by individuals that appear to be trapped in a “Darwinian” matrix of “survival of the fittest/biggest” and of “going it alone” at all cost, which, by the way, is a recipe for romantic, symbolic and specious trappings of black progress.

It is clear that we need to do something, or the black community will find itself reacting to the avalanche of social and economic policies that will reflect a myopic and debilitating vision that maintains the notion of conditioned expectations and the “arrogance of dominance” by a select few. Again, black community, it’s time for some tough decision-making. What are we waiting for, the waving of a magic wand by our first black President, Mr. Barack Obama? Let’s hope not.


Monday, May 3, 2010 at 7:30am

I love summer time and everything about it, especially summer camp. Summer camp provides children with a fun, safe environment to learn new activities, experience new friends, and reinforce academic skills.

Growing up as a child living with sickle cell disease, summer camp was one of the few activities that made me feel normal. I lived in multi-generational household and my grandmother was the larger-than-life figure that ran our home. Keeping me healthy, close to her, and in the house seemed to be her main goals in life. However, she seemed to be a bit more lenient in the summer allowing me to stay up a little later and I was allowed to attend the neighborhood recreation center camp. We played outside daily, did arts and crafts, had spelling and math bees, played board games and jacks, went on field trips, and played in the sprinklers.

When I was looking for a way to expand the program services of Destiny Despite Sickle Cell, developing a summer camp was my first inspiration. Specialty health camps became more available in the 1980’s and 90’s. However, by the mid 2000’s camps for children with sickle cell no longer existed in Baltimore. Sickle Cell Fun in the Sun Summer Day Camp was born in 2009 out of my desire to spread the joys of summer camp to all children especially those with sickle cell disease or trait, their siblings, and children of adults with the disease.

Camp is a simple way to help youth retain some academic information, participate in new activities, enjoy play, and stay out of trouble. Consider these simple tips when choosing a summer camp for your child: fun camps are great because they usually provide a variety of activities; specialty camps are great for children with special health, emotional, or academic needs; encourage your child in a new activity by choosing a different camp than previous years; and, finally, it does not have to break the bank, choose a camp that fits your family’s financial needs ask about scholarships and sibling discounts. Sponsor a needy child if you do not have camp age children. It can be an important influential character building activity and lots of fun.

Monday, April 26, 2010 at 9:30am

In Southwest Baltimore—as well as in communities across the country—our behaviors have led us to unhealthy lives and lifestyles. The increase of chronic health conditions (e.g. high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and stroke) is affecting younger individuals and not enough people are concerned. In some neighborhoods in Southwest Baltimore, the life expectancy is 10-15 years less than in other more affluent neighborhoods. Many individuals living in these disenfranchised communities do not understand how important it is to eat healthy foods and to exercise.

Southwest Baltimore has become a “food desert” because there are very few grocery stores and too many carry-outs. The two supermarkets serving Southwest Baltimore stock only boxed and canned items that have long shelf lives and don’t offer healthier choices. Most local grocery store owners do not live in the communities they serve and claim that the people do not buy or want healthier choices or options. Take a trip to the grocery stores in many of these communities and you will find only whole or 2% milk, many sugary drinks and sodas, but no good quality wheat bread or fresh fruits and vegetables. Residents seeking healthier choices and options must travel outside their community to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and find more choices and wider varieties.

In addition, many residents have not associated the lack of exercise with certain health conditions or failing health. It’s true that residents living in low-income communities cannot afford gym memberships, but there are other ways to exercise. Going back a couple of generations, people did not have cars and walked where they needed to go. Today, people will not walk more than a few blocks without seeking a ride—bus, car, or other means of public transportation. In the past, children had public recreation centers within the neighborhoods. However, in the last decade, city government has closed many recreation centers and the residents have lost programs that promote exercise for adults and children. There have been several attempts to promote walking groups in some communities in Southwest Baltimore, but when the effort goes beyond co-workers and friends to recruit community residents, the excuses begin from people who live in area (e.g. too much crime in the area, will it be safe, seniors are too old, etc.)

A change in behaviors can help create healthier lifestyles and health improvements for our seniors, young residents, and single parents with children. Becoming healthier citizens in Southwest Baltimore and throughout the nation starts with making a commitment to change and to be healthy.

Monday, April 19, 2010 at 9:30am

Here’s my audacious idea: let’s show children just how seriously we take their education by making sure that every school has a least one adult whose job it is to make play happen.

Let’s take play seriously. I don’t mean make it boring and regimented. Play is some of children’s most important work. The motivation to play is hardwired in the growing brain as an essential activity for developing skills that contribute directly to learning; for example, adaptability, creativity, mastery, and connecting with others.

Scientists from a wide variety of fields are now documenting the importance of play. A study published by Einstein University researcher Romina M. Barros, M.D., in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, examined data on 110,000 third graders. The study found that children who received more recess behaved better in class and were more likely to learn more. (For more information on this study, click here.)

Unfortunately, play is too often dismissed as unimportant and expendable—particularly with the pressures facing principals and teachers to meet academic standards and move the needle on student achievement. Recess and other opportunities for play and physical activity are often replaced by additional instructional time. When recess does exist, it can be chaotic and is the last duty a school staff person wants to be assigned.

But recess does not have to be a dreaded part of the school day. Just one person can transform recess. Whether it is a yard supervisor, cafeteria staff, security personnel, physical education teachers, or another adult on a school campus—individuals can be trained to ensure that the power of play is being fully tapped at recess and throughout the school day.

Imagine if all Baltimore City Schools used recess as a tool to support learning? A trained adult coach could make the playground a virtual classroom where students learn teamwork, conflict resolution, creative problem solving and other life lessons that stretch beyond traditional classroom activities. The result would be a stronger learning community and a more positive educational environment.

One well-trained individual could easily create this kind of transformation in a school. All they need is a little training, a few cones, balls, jump ropes and hula hoops, and some enthusiasm. Guaranteed the smiles and high-fives that follow will make school a whole new experience for the kids of Baltimore.

Monday, April 12, 2010 at 9:30am

A lion’s share of the best and the brightest minds devote their energy into designing programs to capture students’ attention in order to improve their performances. The value of teaching facts and history, concepts and theory is understood; the challenge is weaving those elements into a format that imprints on the students, encourages retention, and gets results. A critical part of this challenge is dealing with absenteeism.

How can we inspire students to come to class and pay attention? How can we help them recognize that what they learn today will help them tomorrow?

Whether as a child or as an adult, the answer is often “money.” That topic captures everyone’s attention. So…why not use money as a teaching tool to inspire and motivate students? Programs exist that dangle large sums to encourage performances, but there can be another approach. We all recently experienced the downturn in the economy that magnified our general lack of financial fundamentals. How about investing in the next generation’s education on the subject. Let’s use “money talk” that teaches ways to invest, concepts to consider when opening a business, and ways to expand in the business world. Let’s introduce interest rates, stocks and bonds, and credit card issues. And while students inhale and absorb this practical knowledge, lessons can reinforce the fundamentals of mathematics, reading, critical reasoning, and social studies. This approach can imprint life-lessons on setting and achieving short and long term goals and connecting classroom subjects with “the real world.”

This happens in Stocks in the Future. Through a three-year in-school enrichment program, under-performing middle school students explore the investment world from savings at the local bank to opening a business to placing investments in the stock market. While learning, students can earn up to $80 a year by attending school regularly and improving their grades. They then invest their earnings in the publicly traded companies they study. Academic fundamentals are reinforced while learning “money talk.” Upon graduating from high school, the actual shares students earn are placed in their names. Their investment in school pays off.

And this captivating approach produces results: improved attendance! Research supports this approach. Stocks in the Future students came to school 10 days more each year than their peers; and sixth and seventh graders scored appreciably higher on modified achievement tests. A Hopkins research analyst wrote “the program is having a significant impact on reducing student absenteeism.”

And for most of these youngsters, there is no other resource to pass along this invaluable life skill. It is learning through money that these students learn to invest in school and in themselves.


Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:30am

Green can be a polarizing term. Especially when it brings about images of swimming polar bears, talk of carbon and climate change, or messaging to turn the thermostat down and put on your jumper, like ol’ Jimmy Carter. Environmentalism has typically cast a message about scarcity that only appeals to a relatively small number of people who resonate with this argument. However, through a slightly different approach, Vice President Al Gore presented an intellectual case that seems to have gotten our preconceived notions of tree-huggers and tie-dyes off the table and into the Board room—where they need to be in order to have a larger impact on our environmental and economic bottom lines.

My audacious idea is that Baltimore becomes a model for enterprising community programming that creates a net Green3 result. This vision of a Green3 model is one that supports the three pillars of a sustainable community: stewarding the health of people, stewarding the health of the environment, and having a healthy revenue-generating conduit for these changes. Some advocates call this a triple-bottom line or integrated bottom line. And there is a strong example of this approach happening right now in Baltimore.

Green jobs guru, Van Jones, who many of you may have had the opportunity to share the presence of at the Open Society Institute-Baltimore annual Fellowship Luncheon in 2007, would be taken aback by the innovative green-job development and Green3 programs of Civic Works, Baltimore’s service corps. Three notable programs that Civic Works operates in our cities’ row houses are: B’More Green, Cool Roofs, and EnergyReady. Each focuses on providing hands-on workforce training to unemployed and underemployed city residents while either mitigating brownfield areas or providing energy performance updates for homeowners—increasing their homes’ comfort, efficiency, and striving to save them money on their utility bills as a result of the retrofits. These are programs that we need to support in Baltimore!

B’More Green is 6-week green job training program that has graduated 16 classes since 2003 under Green Projects Director, John Mello. The program provides highly marketable skills to individuals and has resulted in 90% post-program job placement for the over 250 graduates. Cool Roofs is an innovative reflective-roof installation program entering its second full year of operations. Cool Roofs provides on-the-job experiences for underemployed folks, while coating homeowner’s rooftops with a heat and solar reflecting surface—reducing heat absorption of the home, increasing comfort, and lessening demand for air conditioning. EnergyReady launched as a social enterprise, with technical help from the University of Baltimore in 2009 with a crew of 4 eager Baltimoreans who were in need of employment. EnergyReady has doubled in size and is a full home performance contracting program—providing energy audits, consultation, and direct installation of efficiency measures like weather-stripping and insulation. Civic Works is truly an excellent Green3 model organization for Baltimore to celebrate—creating economically-sustainable businesses, training our underemployed in real marketable skills, helping our homeowners make their homes more efficient, and helping our community become a healthier place to live. Go Green3, Hon!