This week, Baltimore Fishbowl featured a profile of 2016 OSI Community Fellow Debbie Ramsey, detailing the former police officer’s work founding Unified Efforts, which seeks to broaden the horizons of young people in Penn North through after-school and summer programming. An excerpt:
“If we can expose our children to new career paths, that will take off,” she says. “I’m not trying to make golfers or pilots or chefs out of them. I don’t know what’s gonna light them up inside. We try to give them an array of experiences.”
Simply getting kids out to other parts of town helps to expand their world, she says. An example: They took a trip this summer to Harbor East, where they visited Whole Foods and walked down to the water. One student observed young white people could walk in groups and not get stopped by police. “For him, that was a new optic. He could not believe—he said, They can walk in groups?”
Unified Efforts has previously been featured on WBAL and WYPR.
