Archive

Listen to Shelley Halstead’s interview with WYPR.  Like most black women, Shelley Halstead has faced race and sex discrimination, and this was no different when she entered the construction field in her twenties. After signing up for a carpentry class at a community college, she joined the carpenters union in Seattle, where she cultivated the […]

When Jennay Ghowrwal was a junior in college, she noticed that someone close to her – once scholarly and determined –began acting paranoid and erratic. The person started suffering from delusions that Ghowrwal and others were plotting conspiracies and that the CIA was controlling the brains of other loved ones. Ghowrwal couldn’t figure out what […]

For his OSI Community Fellowship, Graham Coreil-Allen is working with stakeholders and community members to help re-envision the public spaces around Druid Hill Park. Through his Druid Hill Complete Streets initiative, he aims to work with his neighbors to build support for the philosophy that streets should be safe and accessible for everyone using them […]

Listen to Fred Watkins, Jr.’s interview with WYPR Growing up in Baltimore City, Fred Watkins, Jr. remembers being bullied by his peers. “Those negative feelings you experience as a child – loneliness and low self-esteem – don’t leave when you become an adult,” he says. When faced with depression after a severe neck injury as […]

From a young age, Ciera Daniel recognized the mass persecution of African American males in everyday life. She remembers constantly hearing the message that blacks were inferior to whites. “I saw it throughout my school, in my community, on TV, and in magazines – everywhere. Even some of my family reinforced this idea,” says Daniel. […]

Listen to Eric’s interview with WYPR. Eric Fishel majored in biology at Johns Hopkins University, thinking he would go on to medical school. After working at the Maryland Zoo and Marshy Point Nature Center during college, he realized he felt more connected to the natural world. He detoured into the world of ecology, got a […]

Ava Pipitone isn’t a real estate agent or a social worker. Yet she spends most of her time finding housing for LGBT friends and others connected to the community. When she started doing this, she housed friends herself. Then she started a Facebook group and added a catchy toll-free number, 1-833-HOUSEME2.  When case managers from […]

Brittany Young knows that when many people see a dirt bike rider in Baltimore, they see a lawbreaker and a nuisance. She sees a potential engineer with natural talents and ingenuity. Like James*, a 12-year-old who’s been riding bikes since he was five and has always known the ins and outs of wheels and gears. […]

Aarti Sidhu hadn’t always wanted to be a lawyer; when she was younger, she wanted to be a teacher. But in college, as she learned more about the ways that systems were failing children, she realized she was more interested in finding solutions to those systemic challenges. At the University of Maryland Francis King Carey […]

After building a successful career in sales, Emily Thompson took an unusual step – she quit her job at a national organic food company to run a job training program at a small Baltimore nonprofit, Benevolent Baskets. “When I was in sales, I was travelling all the time,” Thompson says. “Baltimore needs so many things, […]