Every child should experience summer camp

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 […]

Creating a healthier Southwest Baltimore

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 […]

Baltimore: city of ART neighborhoods

I recently returned from a visit to Austin, Texas, whose slogan, “Keep Austin WEIRD,” is pure brilliance. Not only is it found on every product you’d ever want (or not), the concept attracts a diverse and interesting mix of people from all over the world. Our waiter was from Edinburgh (no slouch of a city), […]

Open schools/lifelong learning

America has two kinds of schools: the first are well-equipped private and suburban public institutions or magnet/charter schools with inviting facilities where kids feel at home, feel known, and can grow in a nurturing environment. Having invested in their infrastructure, these “beacon” schools have a vested interest in staying open long after the school day […]

Creating new forms of citizen participation

My audacious idea is that we initiate a process to develop more democratic structures for our city. When our country began, there were town meetings where citizens participated and actually made the decisions. Today, in most places the size of Baltimore, voting is the main way we are asked to practice our “citizenship.” After one […]

Creating green spaces

Everyone knows that Baltimore has a plague of vacant lots that attract nuisances such as dumping, drug use, and crime. Some folks even do something about it, turning a vacant lot in their neighborhood into a community vegetable garden, pocket park, or even horseshoe pit. If you are troubled by a vacant lot near your […]

Baltimore Green Map

I believe that the self-image of our city would be infinitely improved if we could hold in our mind’s eye not just the scenic characteristics that define it – waterfront, stream valleys, parks, monuments, architectural landmarks, major thoroughfares – but also the many elements that show a cleaner, greener, safer, healthier Baltimore to be a […]

The really big idea

Is it audacious of us to believe that a single civic action can change Baltimore? In the 1960’s, construction of The Highway to Nowhere (The Highway, Route 40 East & West) displaced thousands of West Baltimore residents. The Highway is 1.5 miles long—a two minute ride with 3.5 miles of blank, 30-foot walls that block […]

We are the experts we seek

Our society teaches us to seek out “experts”— to fix our cars, heal our bodies, manage our relationships, resolve our conflicts.  You’d think we can’t do much for ourselves.  We’ve created a “nation of clients.” Remember the commercial that shows a big-bellied man sitting at the lunch counter with massive indigestion?  The message of the […]

Everyday heroes

Note: In honor of National Foster Care Month this May, Shantel Randolph, this week’s blogger and 2007 Baltimore Community Fellow, is organizing a picnic for more than 200 foster care youth in the Baltimore area. To read more about her May 10 event, click here. Youth in the foster care system live in a world […]