He’s right. When you stand in the center of this football field in Northwest Baltimore, the grass framed by the backs of rowhouses, a pair of field-goal posts, and oak trees with leaves turning shades of yellow, orange, and red on a chilly late fall day, “You can feel the peace,” says Garrick Williams, the 62-year-old founder of the Park Heights Saints youth football program.

Widely known as the “Mayor of Park Heights,” a description he acknowledges with a wisecrack (“It ain’t an easy job,” he says), Williams, a one-time construction worker turned neighborhood do-gooder, is standing near the center of this piece of land in Lucille Park along Reisterstown Road on an early Friday evening in November. Twenty years ago, this was a notorious abandoned lot populated by drug dealers and addicts. And, even more recently, a bar used to operate on the park’s northeast corner, but it was razed seven years ago at Williams’ urging in favor of a parking lot. That’s where kids now get dropped off three nights a week for practices, led by Williams and dozens of other coaches, some of them former players, others former gang members, yet others Baltimore City police officers.

Not a fan of the cold, the “Mayor” is wearing several layers of Under Armour athletic gear, pants, and a knit hat and greets you with the dap of a lifelong friend. “That’s right, brother, that’s right,” he’s soon saying. Practice, for the Saints’ 10 teams made up of about 250 players ages 5 to 13, will start in an hour. So for now, Williams is happy to stroll around the field and soak up the scene, coach’s clipboard in hand.

He’s talking about the year’s worth of Jericho walks—meaning going seven times around the field—that community members did back in 2000 to take control of the field, when he pauses near the 50-yard line, his back to a setting sun, and puts the existence of this refuge in perspective. A quarter of the residents of zip code 21215, the primarily black neighborhood that abuts Pimlico Race Course, live in poverty, making it a breeding ground for violence, gang recruitment, and drug dealing in the surrounding houses and blocks.

“Things still go on in Park Heights, but it won’t go on here,” Williams says of the field. “This is like a sanctuary.”

Williams is a youth football coach with hundreds of children and roughly 45 coaches under his supervision per year but, without any hyperbole, he is much more. “To know him is to love him,” says Kiante Chase, an electrician from Dundalk and a father of three who coaches the Saints’ under-11-year-old team.

Williams has lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades with his wife, Theresa, and has been a community liaison and youth outreach worker for the past 18 years at nearby Sinai Hospital. He’s an evangelical minister, a violence-prevention mentor at area schools, like KIPP Academy, and has won various awards for service and leadership. But a lot of what he does goes unnoticed, like organizing a food drive a few weeks ago at the field, and handing out flyers on the street to promote it.

“He’s always saying, ‘It ain’t about me, it’s about these kids,’” says Sirena Alford, the Baltimore City representative for the nonprofit organization Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which administers the Saints’ program. “But he still is the voice for them.”

In high school, Williams played football, baseball, and basketball at Carver Vocational-Technical High School, but had no intentions of coaching any sports until his son started playing football in the late 1990s. By that time, Williams had already started to cultivate his faith through the Agape Miracle Church in Park Heights, after being recruited while walking past one day on the sidewalk. He put two and two together, realizing football could be a vehicle to spread the good word. He started going by the name “Coach G” or “Brother G.”

“The kids are going to follow the coaches,” Williams says. “I thought I could use this as a ministry. They want to know football, I want them to know Christ and life.”

Importantly, the “Home of the Saints,” as the banner says near its entrance, is by no coincidence located right near the site of the church that Williams joined 30 years ago. It’s also close to his own house, where he and his wife raised their three children.

Most notably, though, a two-minute walk will bring you to 4804 Reisterstown Road. The 2,000-square-foot home is essentially a brand new three-story gathering place for all the kids in the Park Heights youth football program. It’s open every Wednesday after school, and functions as another sanctuary for kids growing up in an area where the life expectancy is more than 10 years shorter than for those living in upper-middle-class Mount Washington a mile away.

The home was once the site of a nondenominational ministry and food pantry, where Williams and many others were discipled by the late Rev. Eleanor Bryant, but the building had fallen into disrepair in recent years, like many others in the neighborhood. One night four years ago, Williams had a dream to remodel the house into a place Saints’ players could feel safe in.

“On September 30, 2015, at 1 in the morning, the Lord allowed me to dream,” Williams typed on a computer the next morning. “This is what he showed me.”

A living room with a white leather sofa and chairs. A big TV. A nice kitchen. Upstairs, a computer room and a bedroom, should it be needed. And a weight room in the basement and a deck out back. It’s now a reality, thanks to private donors and volunteers and an effort led by local businessman Frank Kelly III and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes: The roughly $250,000 Park Heights Saints Community Center opened its front door in March.

William typically repeats what sound like Bible verses every day, but they’re not: “Your first name is choices, your last name is consequences;” “The world doesn’t owe you anything. You owe yourself everything;” “The two words that make a real man? Responsibility and commitment.”

He repeats “Brother G’s Pledges” before every practice, when he gathers kids beneath a tree for a sermon of sorts. He conveys wisdom with almost every sentence he delivers, about big broad themes like right and wrong, joy and pain, life and death.

“Group talks, he calls them,” says 13-year-old Kylan Duppins, who attends KIPP Academy, is a lineman for the Saints, and lives around the corner. “He talks about things like, don’t take life for granted because some people didn’t wake up this morning. Love your family because one day you might not have them.”

Williams knows. As a toddler, his father was shot and killed during an argument at a party, and his stepfather and mother separated when he was a teenager. It’s an all-too-familiar tale around here.

“A lot of the kids don’t have both parents. Sometimes they don’t have one,” Chase says. “It’s a bad area. We got kids from all over, but the majority of the kids come from broken homes.”

Others involved in the program share their stories, too. Antonio DeShields, 39, a former Division I football recruit at Cardinal Gibbons who grew up on Virginia Avenue in Park Heights, nearly died as a high school senior. Hospital workers ruptured an artery in his leg while popping a knee injured during a football game back into place. With his scholarship offers gone, he spiraled into a suicidal depression before Williams asked him to come to a practice 19 years ago to talk to the kids.

Raymond Queen, who lost his father at age 7 to murder, became a police officer. Former player Brian Ford did, too. Several other coaches are former gang members, like Gerald Butler, the Saints’ vice president, who now manages a few real estate properties. “You got a lot of coaches that have a past, too,” he says.

Val Knight, 31, another coach, grew up in Greenmount and flunked out of Cornell University as a freshman after earning a football and lacrosse scholarship there. “I see a lot of me in a lot of these kids,” he says, “and I’m trying to get them to not make the same mistake I made.”

Tonight, though, in a rare occasion, there’s no such pre-practice huddle under the wisdom tree. It’s getting close to 6 p.m., it’s already dark, and starting at 9 tomorrow morning, all of the Saints’ teams will play in a series of local championship games at Frederick Douglass High School. In other words, time is short. But the lessons aren’t. As dozens of kids arrive, from tiny tots to teenagers with who-knows-what on their minds, we ask Coach G a simple question: Isn’t all this hard?

“Hard?” he says, “Everything’s hard, but it’s about having a purpose. If you don’t have a purpose to live, you’ll just die of not doing anything. I love people. I don’t do this for my own accolades. I do it because I want to change the community. I want to change lifestyles, and this is how you get the message across. That’s my purpose. And, alongside all that, we’re winners.”

So you want to donate your time or money—or both—to a charitable cause. But where to begin? And which of the many worthy causes are not just legit, but run efficiently?

For that matter, which of the challenges facing the metro area should you focus on? You have lots of choices: homelessness, gross inequities in education, shortages of affordable housing, a lack of job training, few options for underprivileged inner-city youth, and a thriving and deadly drug trade.

So in the pages that follow, we offer a little bit of a primer not just on public charities, but on the region’s best-known foundations, as well as big, national nonprofits that are active here. We also offer some tips on what to look for in a charity—and even how to start your own.

We’re not going to tell you which charity to get involved with—but we can help you make an informed decision.

 

➔ Writer D. Watkins, photographer Devin Allen, and poet Kondwani Fidel have each earned national praise for their personal, often Baltimore-inspired work. But rather than head for the bright lights elsewhere, the three close friends have remained here, at least in part, because of their shared commitment to the city’s youth, which includes donating countless hours, as well as books, to local schools. To find out what makes them tick, we met them at R. House in Remington and asked about how they broke in as artists, their work in schools—and what Baltimore students need to succeed.

Bmag: D, can you go first and talk about starting out as a writer and the challenges coming from outside the traditional white publishing networks? Did you have a mentor?

D. Watkins: There weren’t people, writers in Baltimore, with whom I could connect, or directly learn from, until after I was already in it. You think about that because maybe your career could’ve started five years earlier if you knew somebody. In our industry, more people get published because of who they know, rather than their straight work. You know someone, boom. You don’t, you can send the best s--- out to magazines for years and it will just sit at the bottom of a stack.

Devin Allen: That’s how it was for me. I’d shoot stuff, shoot protests, send it out for free, just ask for a credit, and not even get a reply to an email. I did get a reply once from the City Paper, but nothing from The Sun. Not until I got the cover of Time, and then they wanted to interview me [for my Reginald F. Lewis Museum show]. At that point, I didn’t want anything to do with them, but the museum wanted me to do the interview. I did it, but not until they apologized.

Kondwani Fidel: After I graduated [from Virginia State University] in 2015, I traveled around the city doing spoken word and got a good response. I dropped this poem called “The Baltimore Bullet Train” with a video and it got like 20,000 views on YouTube. Then, I finished my first collection of poetry and my first book, and teachers started asking me to come to their classes. Everything grew from there. I teach now, perform, do workshops.

Bmag: You each spend a lot of time in public schools, making hundreds of visits. What do you hope to accomplish?

Watkins: I was struggling to get published, but then my first Salon article came out, my second Salon article, then a City Paper article …and Baltimore City school teachers started reaching out to me. While these articles were doing well on the internet, kids in schools had started reading them, too. I didn’t think much about reading coming up. It wasn’t really my thing and it wasn’t until later that I realized how much I loved reading and that I wanted to be a writer. I had never met a person who looked like me who was a writer, and seen them come hang out in school when I was in school.

Allen: You got to go and think, “I’m going to change someone’s life today.”

Fidel: At first, I didn’t understand what [teachers] wanted from me. I didn’t have a degree in education. But when I started visiting these schools, kids would say, “I didn’t think I liked poetry until I heard your work” and “Yours is the first book I read cover to cover.” I looked at the things that helped transform me and it was texts that were relatable. I fell in love with reading through a college professor’s readings at Virginia State…so I started thinking about how I felt slighted in high school. I started thinking it’s part of my obligation to get students excited about reading and get them engaged in literature at a younger age than I was exposed to it.

Bmag: What obstacles have you run into working with students?

Watkins: One teacher, who worked on the curriculum, told me he was pretty sure they were going to put The Beast Side on the required reading list. Kids were already reading it and stealing copies from classrooms, which was crazy and great because, by that time, I already had a New York Times bestseller to my name and a presence in Baltimore City schools. Then, they denied it because of the profanity.

Allen: A lot of times, there’s too much politics working with schools. Same with nonprofits. It takes too much time. So I’ll go to a rec center and use my own money, or get my own grant. At the Kids Safe Zone, after the Baltimore Uprising, I got a grant from [music mogul] Russell Simmons, put the cameras in my trunk, and started working with the kids. Same with the St. Francis Center. MICA wanted to do a show with some of my work and I told them they could use my work, sure, but, “How about donating some point-and-shoot cameras” and I did a workshop. I’ve given away almost 500 cameras.

Watkins: The bottom line is, I need to be in schools. They read one of my books, or one of Konnie’s books, and they like it and meet us. That might turn them on to another book. And now, they’re not only loving our Baltimore stories, which are their own stories, they’re learning about other places from different stories and they are in the game.

Bmag: A common theme is Baltimore students need to be reached with material that will engage them. Maybe don’t start with traditional English or world literature?

Fidel: Things Fall Apart [a 1958 novel written by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe] is a good book, but it was hard for me to connect to that book in high school. I didn’t know anything about Africa and the complicated issues he was dealing with. It was foreign. But imagine if you use the same themes that were in that book, but it was based in Baltimore, and the writing had Baltimore vernacular—I probably would’ve engaged in it. Not to say we didn’t have artists and writers who shared the same skin complexion as me, but those Baltimore experiences, I didn’t see them in anything we were being taught.

Watkins: If they read [Fidel’s book] Hummingbirds in the Trenches, it is going to hit them. It’s an authentic story from a person that is here and accessible and loves them, and it just bleeds through all the work.

Bmag: Do you believe writing, poetry, and photography help students dealing with trauma?

Fidel: When I speak about painful experiences, it lets students know they aren’t alone. Teachers and adults say things like, “I don’t know if they are ready for that conversation,” whether it’s about trauma or violence or people getting their brains spilled on the curb. How are they not ready for the conversation when they witness it firsthand? They read my work, and they’re like, “Okay, it’s normal for me to feel depressed and it’s normal for me to cry. It’s normal for me to be upset with what’s going on in my community and in the world.”

Bmag: You are all also active on social media. Why is that important?

Fidel: We share a lot of things the students share, we share a lot of the same interests, but we still travel to Japan, to London, wherever, and we do all those things and come back to Baltimore.

Bmag: Why do you think Baltimore students are attracted to your work? Or to writing, poetry, and photography in general?

Allen: You would be surprised how many kids grew up in the ’hood that have few photographs of themselves and their families. Then, when they take a photograph, there’s that moment to look at it and self-reflect. They see their friends, too, and it opens up communication on a different level. It allows them to digest what’s around them and regurgitate what’s around them to the rest of the world. Kids walk past addicts and vacant houses every day, it’s nothing to them, but when they start photographing it, it’s like, “Oh, this s--- isn’t normal.” They’re just so desensitized to it. It’s a stress reliever and a conversation starter.

Fidel: Baltimore is an uncanny, peculiar city. For them to be able to look at photographs, to read poems and books from Baltimore artists who share the same experience, teaches them how to build a life like we actually face, not a fairy-tale life.

Bmag: What can schools and artists do to help students?

Watkins: If a person is an artist in Baltimore, with world-wide notoriety or not, and they are willing to come talk about the beauty of art and the beauty of creation, then schools should work hard at connecting them with kids and building those relationships. There should be fellowships and stipends to purchase their work and bring that into schools. They waste so much money on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Allen: I didn’t start until I was 25 and I taught myself. I can only imagine if I knew a photographer and I started at 16, 15. Photography is not even in public schools. I talk to white photographers and they’re going to private schools that have darkrooms. Photography transcends so many different spaces. Look at social media. Photography needs to be in schools.

Fidel: They need to teach rap and spoken word in schools.

Bmag: Devin, from Instagram, etc., do students recognize you when you visit? Do they know the Time magazine cover? Or about shooting for Under Armour?

Allen: They don’t care about the Time cover. Once they know I shoot for Under Armour and I shoot Steph Curry, it’s over. They’re hooked. One girl, at a school I hadn’t been to, told The Baltimore Sun that I deserved a statue and so I popped up on her and visited her class. She was nervous, but the teachers and kids were all taking pictures with me. It was dope.

Bmag: What do you think would surprise people from outside about city students?

Fidel: All these kids want to learn, they want to be creative, and they want to be engaged.

Bmag: What else do they need?

Fidel: The best that we have to offer. They see these other schools, private schools in the city, and they see what they get—and they’re not even getting functioning heat and air conditioning. Then, we deny them representations of themselves. Their experiences are scarcely mentioned or omitted completely—and people wonder why some act out. If this country and this city know the importance of education—where the best education can lead you and where a lack of education can lead you—why is it that we give the black and brown students that live in these underserved areas the least?

Receiving the keys to her 2005 Honda Odyssey changed Janell Johnson’s life. “I felt so empowered,” she recalls of the day in 2012.

The community activist and single mother of four no longer had to leave home three hours before work in case of bus delays. And her hard-earned money could go into the gas tank rather than toward taxis.

She had a stable career working for the Department of Social Services in Anne Arundel County, but was limited by a lack of reliable transportation. “I would get these 20-year-old cars with hundreds of thousands of miles on them,” Johnson says. “They would break, and then I would just have to rely on the bus and taxi cabs.”

It’s a familiar challenge for families across the region. In Baltimore, 33 percent of residents lack access to a car. In historically disenfranchised neighborhoods, the number is much higher—around 80 percent.

Vehicles for Change, a Halethorpe-based nonprofit offering car donation and reentry internship programs for ex-prisoners, is dedicated to changing those statistics.

“Car ownership just opens up so many opportunities for folks,” says Marty Schwartz, president of Vehicles for Change. “Now the job market is not just within a mile or two of your house. It’s unlimited.”

He references a 2011 study by the Brookings Institute that found 71 percent of zero-car households in the Baltimore area are low-income, and that more than 6,000 car-free households also lack access to jobs via public transportation.

“People are not getting out of poverty until you get them a vehicle.”

The process works like this: Individuals and companies donate cars to Vehicles for Change, which fixes them up in its shop, then awards them to individuals who have applied to the program through local social service agencies.

The cars aren’t free, but pretty close: Most vehicles provided to qualifying families cost around $900, come with a six-month, 6,000-mile warranty, and should run reliably for at least 24,000 miles or two years. Low-interest loans keep the monthly car payments around $90 and help awardees build credit.

Donated cars that aren’t great fits are used in other ways. Luxury or newer-model cars are sold through its used-car lot, Freedom Wheels, with proceeds going back to the nonprofit. Total junkers, meanwhile, are sold for scrap or parts.

Since its founding in 1999, the organization has grown from a single small space in a Beltsville warehouse to a network of shops serving communities in greater Baltimore, Washington D.C., Virginia, and even Detroit.

It awards anywhere from 300 to 350 cars per year in the Maryland and Virginia area. While the demand is much higher, they are limited by the number of donations received. “We could be awarding 1,000 cars per year, easily,” Schwartz says. “Our biggest challenge is always getting enough cars.”

Schwartz says he envisions the program expanding nationwide, building on existing relationships with companies like Advance Auto Parts, MileOne Autogroup, and Hunter Engineering. “The goal is to build this public-private partnership that can really make this program available on a national scale.”

And then there’s the nonprofit’s job-training contribution: Its most recent program, Full Circle Auto Repair and Training Center, provides employment opportunities while addressing the lack of certified auto mechanics across the country.

Launched in 2015, the four-month internship for the recently or currently incarcerated provides participants with Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) classroom training and connects them with jobs upon graduation.

“The program really started out of a necessity to get our cars fixed,” Schwartz says, adding that when the organization acquired its current warehouse and auto shop in 2012, it couldn’t find enough qualified mechanics to hire. It was a challenge echoed by the local garages they had been working with.

It’s a problem mirrored across the country: There are about 750,000 auto mechanics and technicians nationwide. But with a large percentage nearing retirement and a growing need for skilled workers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 76,000 new employees would need to enter the industry each year to meet demands.

When Schwartz learned that the Maryland Department of Labor offered an automotive training program, it sparked an idea.

“Why should we train guys from the ground up when we can work with returning citizens and give them opportunities?” Schwartz says. “They weren’t getting jobs when they were coming out, for the most part. Everybody needs an opportunity.”

The program works: Of the more than 130 people who have enrolled in the internship, 100 percent completed the training and were placed in jobs. So far, only one has been reincarcerated.

Finding success at the Halethorpe headquarters, the program has been expanded to a garage on Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood and to Vehicles for Change’s office in Detroit. Locations in Richmond, Salisbury, and Prince George’s County are on the drawing board.

The programs, which are open to the public for services like oil changes and diagnostic tests and repairs, offer more than technical training. It’s a safe space for interns during the transition back into society that connects them with resources to help along the way.

Seven years after getting the keys to her Honda Odyssey, Janell Johnson, pictured with Schwartz, is back at the organization that changed her life—this time as the senior manager of the Full Circle reentry program.

At her office in the auto shop, a photo of the current class of interns hangs beside her desk. On a piece of copy paper taped to the supply room door, Johnson has scrawled her mantra: “Wait until you see why.”

It’s part of her motivation for interns to stick it out through the challenging moments that make them want to throw in the towel, like one former intern who rode the bus two hours each way to get to the shop. When he showed up drenched from rain and especially disheartened on a stormy day, she reminded him that his hard work would pay off down the road.

After completing the program, he was hired by a local mechanic shop and returned to pay a visit. “That day that he came in here with that uniform on—oh, man,” she recalls with emotion. “I didn’t say a word. We just hugged each other.”

Johnson, who joined Vehicles for Change in early 2019 from a career in healthcare and social services, says her job often includes “being their mama bear.”

“There is an element of case management, but I’m really their accountability partner,” she explains. “We have individuals who come in here from years and years of incarceration. And while being trained to repair vehicles is all fine and dandy, they should also have access to resources. So that’s what my priority is.”

The internship also provides critical real-world experience for their resumes, and an employer who can vouch for them in a job interview.

“By the time they complete the program in four months, they leave with a job and a renewed sense of hope,” Johnson says.

It also really does come full circle: If a graduate of the training program has a job and no access to a car, Vehicles for Change will help with that, too.

Whether through the training program or by awarding cars, Schwartz says the life-changing opportunities the nonprofit provides to the community keep him motivated to show up to work each day.

“We get to see these people come back when they’re buying homes and having kids. It’s just amazing to be part of that.”

When Steven Clapp was in Ninth grade at Dunbar High School, a woman came into band class and read off a list of students’ names. “I was playing snare drum and minding my own business,” Clapp, now 20, says. “She told us to follow her. I thought I was in trouble.”

The woman, who, it turns out, was employed by a nonprofit, led them to another room, where she said, “You’re gonna take this quiz, you’re gonna eat this pizza, and you’re gonna like it,” Clapp recalls.

The chosen students, identified as “high potential, low performers,” he says, had been selected to participate in Thread, an organization that provides a network of support to each student, committing to the student in various ways for 10 years.

Clapp, pictured, who didn’t have money for food that day, did as he was told and liked it. Not just the pizza, though that seems to have been a valued perk. “Thread drowned us in pizza,” he says. “Plus, we got Chipotle at midterms and finals.”

But the relationship didn’t end with a free lunch: Over the years that he’s been involved with Thread, he’s received all sorts of support—everything from a lift from Dunbar (in East Baltimore) to his brother’s house in Pikesville, to help with homework, to just having someone to hang out with on a summer afternoon. “If it weren’t for Thread, I’d be working at Wendy’s,” says Clapp, who currently freelances as a music producer and helps market a new app affiliated with Thread.

Today, more than two years after graduating from high school, he sits in a small meeting room at the Thread headquarters in Mondawmin Mall with Vince Talbert, one of his mentors—Thread calls them “volunteers”—to talk about the program. This time, there are donuts.

The two met in 2018 when Talbert, a tech entrepreneur who started the company Bill Me Later (which he later sold to PayPal) began developing an app to support Thread. The platform, called Thrive, is designed to help scale Thread’s activities by connecting its participants.

Talbert began his relationship with Thread as a “collaborator,” one of the three legs, along with the students and volunteers, of the Thread system. Collaborators donate their unique professional expertise—in Talbert’s case, software development. Other collaborators might include tutors or experts in law, college admissions, or job readiness. Talbert soon transitioned to volunteering with students and is now a “head of family” in Thread parlance. “Steven kind of recruited me,” Talbert explains. “We were working on the app research and he said, ‘You should be my volunteer.’” Talbert later hired Clapp to introduce students to the app.

Clapp is just one of Thread’s success stories: Founded in 2004 by wife and husband Sarah and Ryan Hemminger, when Sarah was a graduate student in biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins medical campus—a neighbor to Dunbar High School—they recruited volunteers from the School of Medicine to work with 15 at-risk students, helping them with whatever they needed. “We started with 15 students, two volunteers, and one high school,” she says. Initially, Thread took on new students every three years, and eventually graduated a class after three years. In 2019, 112 ninth graders entered the program.

This year, the organization will serve 735 students from six high schools with about 2,000 volunteers, says Sarah Hemminger.

“We’re trying to knit together an entirely new social fabric in the city.” By remaining alongside students through graduation and into adulthood, Thread establishes trust, she says. “We’re focused on building relationships gradually and intentionally.” Volunteers commit to at least one year, but a large number remain for two years and beyond.

Part of the nonprofit’s mission stems from Ryan, who struggled in high school after his home life took a dramatic turn. A handful of his teachers rallied around him, providing clothing, food, and even bus fare. He eventually became an A student, a varsity athlete, and a graduate of the Naval Academy.

What sets Thread apart from most mentoring programs is the concentrated and long-term involvement: four volunteers, one student, 10 years. Another critical difference, according to Allison Buchalter, Thread’s vice president of involvement: “We never call them mentors. That implies a power structure.”

Hemminger’s vision takes it a step further, seeing the relationship as a give and take. She strongly believes that volunteers benefit from their Thread families as much as the students do. Baltimore, she says, “historically has had a lot of policies that intentionally segregated us. It has created isolation—not just by race, but by class,” she says. “Thread helps to bring people together across those lines in a way that is transformational for everyone.”

“The way the narrative is usually told is there’s a group of haves who need to save the have-nots,” she continues. “But if you define the problem as social isolation, it repositions all of us to be in need and have the capacity to provide help.”

Indeed, observing Clapp, a young adult with a challenging Baltimore City childhood, and Talbert, who lives in a big house in Lutherville and drives a Tesla, it’s difficult to determine for certain who’s helping whom. Talbert recalls once complaining to Clapp that he was having a bad day: “His answer was, put on something snazzy, get out the Tesla, we’re going down to Baltimore Street.” Talbert says he passed on the night out, but was touched nonetheless. The father of two says, “You get to a point where you’ve done your job with your kids and they’re on their way. You become less important.” Of his relationship with Clapp, he says, “It’s great to matter in his life, and he matters in my life. He makes me smile every day.”

In turn, Talbert has helped Clapp reach specific goals. One was getting a driver’s license so he had more access to employment. To work in Mount Washington, five miles from his home in Park Heights, Talbert says, Clapp would have had to take buses all the way into the city and back north again. “We decided the best way to get the best job opportunities was to work on getting a license and a car,” says Talbert, who lent Clapp money for a Nissan Altima soon after the younger man passed his driving test.

Hemminger, who in 2010 passed on a position at the National Institutes of Health to work on Thread full-time, says the organization’s current goal is to change the culture of the city. “The ultimate intention is to serve 7.5 percent of all students in Baltimore City public schools,” she says. That would mean working with about 3,000 young people and about 8,000 volunteers. Once you add board members, collaborators, staff, and relatives, she says, “We’d be a community of about 20,000 Baltimoreans—or roughly 5 percent of the adult population in the city.”

In the meantime, Talbert is helping Clapp to set career goals. “I know nothing about music,” says Talbert, “but I play squash with a professor at Peabody.” After meeting with Clapp, Talbert’s squash buddy confirmed the student’s potential on the drums. “He immediately said, ‘He’s really talented,’ and he’s suggesting schools Steven could go to and professors he could work with,” Talbert says. “Now we just have to figure out the right game plan.”

“That’s really the magic of Thread,” Talbert continues. “It’s connecting people who wouldn’t otherwise be connected. Creating pathways that didn’t exist.”

Fresh marketing campaigns about their community involvement, new Baltimore-boosting billboards, words of sympathy, and small donations to this or that urban cause.

In many cases, that was the response of the local business community to the uprising in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray. But it wasn’t enough for Calvin Butler.

The St. Louis native had been named the CEO of BGE just the year before—he has since been promoted by parent company Exelon—but he was already plugged into the city, its struggles, and its capacity to make itself stronger. And the unrest put him into action.

By his own admission, Butler is not a patient man, but that’s paid off for Charm City. After the unrest, he immediately thought of what he and BGE could do to effect a long-term sustainable change—not just write a check.

“What was interesting about [the Freddie Gray uprising] was a lot of people were giving a little money here and there, but at the end of the day, if people don’t have jobs, if people don’t have hope, they’re going to do what they have to do,” Butler says. “The city felt, in real time, what happens when people feel as if they’re being suppressed.”

Butler knew there were job opportunities in his energy sector. He also knew there was opportunity in construction. Over the course of several Saturdays, Butler met at Atwater’s off York Road with Whiting-Turner CEO Tim Regan. Together, they mapped out an idea on the back of a napkin.

“We recognized people who feel disenfranchised lack a couple of things: mentors, social capital, and opportunities,” says Butler, who, in December, was put in charge of other Exelon utilities as well. “We didn’t want to create something new because there are already many organizations in the city doing great things, so we went to the community in West Baltimore and asked them what we could do.”

The initial idea evolved into TouchPoint, co-founded in 2017 by BGE and Whiting -Turner. Located in Mondawmin, it brings together three pre-existing, high-performance nonprofits—Thread, Center for Urban Families, and Baltimore Corps. According to Sarah Hemminger, CEO of educational outreach nonprofit Thread, TouchPoint nurtures the existing talent pipeline in the city “from cradle to career,” by bringing nonprofits, community partners, and all their associated audiences together to volunteer and collaborate across silos.

“TouchPoint is an unprecedented example of a space where Baltimoreans come together across lines of difference to build relationships and access opportunity,” Hemminger says.

This type of large-scale, programmatic philanthropy has become a signature of Butler’s approach to outreach. In addition to co-founding TouchPoint, Butler also used the Freddie Gray uprising as a catalyst to develop BGE’s Smart Energy Workforce Development program. Working in partnership with four Baltimore City and County vocational schools, BGE offers field trips to its facilities and provides summer internships to high-school students. Since its inception in 2017, 11 full-time BGE employees have been hired from the program.

Since Butler joined BGE, the company also has given more than $30 million to area nonprofits. Following Butler’s lead, the employees at BGE, who nominate their own “Employee Cause Initiative” each year, have seen an uptick in their dollars raised year-over-year. Over his tenure, employees have also given more than 100,000 service hours.

Butler has overseen large contributions, partnering with the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation to open Eddie Murray Field at BGE Park in West Baltimore, where the oldest continually operating African-American youth baseball league plays. And under his leadership, BGE became a founding lead sponsor for Light City. He’s also made small contributions that make a lasting impression, like painting BGE’s storage tanks with murals to beautify the southern entrance to the city.

“These are things that are outside the box of what your traditional utility might do,” says Butler, who says his commitment to philanthropy comes from his own experience with mentors.

BGE’s Butler was one of the co-founders of TouchPoint.

“I always talk about finding your purpose and, for me, as an African-American business leader, my purpose has been to impact young people, specifically kids of color,” he says. “There are not many people like myself sitting in the top positions of companies; if I can be a role model to them, that to me is a driving force for why I do what I do.”

Of course, Butler is a businessman, and he does not shy away from underscoring that BGE’s growth is dependent on a strong, healthy city and surrounding area. He believes it’s also good business to create a workforce at BGE that is diverse and inclusive. Currently, BGE customer satis- faction is at an all-time high; in June, BGE was recognized as one of the nation’s most trusted utilities, according to industry- review analytics firm Escalent. And Butler says it’s no coincidence that the company’s peak performance is coinciding with its commitment to employee diversity.

“For the last five years, we’ve received the highest customer satisfaction in our 200-plus year history, best financial performance, and highest reliability, and, to me, the team we’ve put together, which is the most diverse in BGE’s history, is indicative of what can happen when you hire diverse people of diverse backgrounds, talents, and skills, and enable them to do their jobs.”

At the same time, Butler has radically improved BGE’s spending with women-, minority-, and veteran-owned businesses (WMVBs). When he joined the company, it was spending roughly 14 percent with these entities; in 2019, BGE committed 40 percent to WMVBs.

The example set by the utility captured the attention of other local institutions. Ronald Daniels, president of The Johns Hopkins University, worked with Butler to bring the Roca anti-violence program to Baltimore. Says Daniels, “Calvin has the rare ability to understand the complexity of the city’s needs and then summon up the moral, strategic, and financial savvy to respond to those needs in a compelling way.”

“When there’s a challenge that crops up in the city,” Daniels adds, “Cal is at the top of my speed dial to figure out how we can make a difference.”

In the wake of Freddie Gray, Johns Hopkins also looked into how it could have a sustainable impact. Understanding that strong local businesses would enable much-needed job growth, Hopkins wanted to be more intentional in its support of local and WMVBs in its procurement, construction, and hiring.

HopkinsLocal, as the program became known, drew on the BGE playbook. Then Mike Hankin, president and CEO of money management firm Brown Advisory, suggested amplifying the impact across other city businesses. Daniels and Butler answered that call in 2016, co-founding BLocal, a coalition of city businesses committed to supporting local businesses and workers. It now has 28 partners including T. Rowe Price, Legg Mason, KPMG, Under Armour, The Cordish Companies, Howard and M&T Banks, and DLA Piper. In their first year, BLocal businesses spent $73.8 million with WMVB vendors in construction and purchasing, plus another $2.3 million in non-construction purchasing; and as of late November of last year, the coalition had spent more than $280 million. In addition, BLocal has encouraged the hiring of more than 1,700 local employees.

“Freddie Gray was a cry, a call to do better as a city,” says Butler. “Do I think we’ve made progress? Yes. Do I think we’re close to being there? No, because as long as we have high unemployment rates in pockets of the city, high healthcare disparity, as long as kids in certain zip codes don’t get the same level of education, there’s a problem.”

He’s optimistic that breaking down silos and providing opportunities for young people and their parents will lead to prog- ress. Given BGE and parent firm Exelon’s size and reach, he anticipates playing an expansive role in radical change, not only in Baltimore but also across BGE’s wider customer area.

“I recognize our leadership responsibility as a corporate citizen because we’re not packing up and going anywhere. So what do we do with that responsibility?” Butler asks. “I think leaning in and not only being a trendsetter but a thought provoker, an impact player, is who we are.”

Gardnel Carter can still recall his first anti-violence mediation at McElderry Park’s Safe Streets site in East Baltimore. Recently released from prison, he was well-suited to the job of canvassing the community looking for high-risk youth in danger of committing violence. After all, he’d been in their shoes.

As a Safe Streets “Violence Interrupter” (VI), it was Carter’s job to step between warring parties, de-escalate the tension, and mediate a peaceful solution so no one got shot. At the time, in 2007, the program was new and had yet to gain the trust of the neighborhood. But Carter had to put his training to the test.

“One of my clients [he refers to residents he’s working with as clients] I was working with got in it with a major player—he was thinking he was going to lose his life,” Carter recalls.

Carter called for a mediation at the office and was waiting with his client, the client’s two friends, and his Safe Streets teammates for the opposing person to arrive. He didn’t come, but he sent 15 members of his crew instead—and they didn’t want to talk.

“I said, ‘Not in here, we’re here to squash this kind of stuff,’” Carter recalls. “We asked, ‘Who are the shot callers?’ and then we sent everyone else outside. Eventually, the main guy came and he walked straight up on my guy like he was going to smack everything out of him and my guys were like, ‘Hold up bra’—you can’t do this, this isn’t how it works.’”

Eventually, everyone sat down and it became clear the grievance was based on misinformation. And the two men talked out a solution.

“When it was all settled, those guys spread the word on the street about Safe Streets saying, ‘These guys don’t want us killing each other. They’re not here to stop us from hustling or anything, they just want to take the violence out of our everyday situations,’” says Carter, who is now the site’s director. “That spread all over this area.”

Thereafter, the McElderry Park Safe Streets zone went 23 months without a single homicide.

McElderry Park was the first Safe Streets location, opened in partnership with the Baltimore City Health Department and Living Classrooms Foundation (LCF). There are now eight sites throughout Baltimore City, four of which opened last year alone. In 2018, then-Mayor Catherine Pugh moved the program to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice for funding purposes, but the program remains committed to treating violence as a public health problem.

“We see violence as a contagion and it makes communities sick by spreading from one person to another,” says Dedra Layne, director of Safe Streets Baltimore in the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “We use the same approach to deal with a contagion that the World Health Organization uses to treat an epidemic.”

Layne explains the three-pronged approach: Identify individuals at high risk for violent behaviors (mostly young men ages 14 to 25 with a history of violence, gang activity, and incarceration), interrupt and intervene in potentially violent conflicts with mediation, and then work to change community norms around the acceptance of violence.

The work happens on the street, but the program is data-driven. After canvassing, VIs input their interactions into a database analyzed by the mayor’s office. Data for the first 10 months of 2019 shows the program’s efficacy, reporting 1,387 conflict mediations. Most zones report marked decreases in shootings and homicides compared to their neighbors.

Safe Streets also employs VIs as hospital responders at three area medical centers to support victims. Layne says this is successful at curbing retaliatory acts of violence after a person is released from the hospital and improves the chances the victims will seek follow-up care.

It’s no mistake that Safe Streets applies a public-health model. It’s based on a program begun in Chicago originally called CeaseFire, now Cure Violence, founded by physician Gary Slutkin, former head of the WHO’s Intervention Development Unit and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Baltimore was an early adopter of the program and Cure Violence conducts the 40-hour training for new Safe Streets staffers and subsequent booster trainings.

The model is rooted in the belief that violence is a behavior, like smoking or exercise, that is unconsciously copied so that it begets more violence. By interrupting violence, it gives potential shooters not only a chance to cool down but also to learn a better way of handling disputes.

“We see violence as a learned behavior, and to unlearn it, you have to replace it with an alternate way of being,” says Layne. “Historically, we’ve worked in our country to eradicate violence with policing. We see that is not the only answer.”

The Sandtown-Winchester site is housed in a tidy former rectory overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Across the street are deserted homes, partially boarded-up, their windows black and empty. Standing on the steps outside, program manager Imhotep Fatiu’s passion is palpable. He wants Safe Streets to become a Baltimore movement, a wave that turns the city around.

“There’s not a single person in the city of Baltimore who can’t benefit from a reduction in shootings and homicides,” he says. “Schools, churches, businesses. Who wants to send their child to school if they keep finding bodies on the playground? How do you make money if they keep killing people outside your business?

“If we don’t get behind this now while we have a chance to, it’s a disease and it will spread.”

On a cold, wet day in October, the VIs at McElderry Park gather for their pre-canvas briefing in their signature black jackets with their bright orange logos. Across the street, a police car’s lights flash; a store was burgled earlier that day. A handful of kids file in and play on the boxing equipment. Resident Gardnel Carter says he sees the area trying to rebound and the VIs see the success of the program all around them.

“We’re all from around here and the block we hang on, our friends, they’re all employed now,” says Kennard Miles, a current VI. “We all still hang out—but only after work.”

His colleague, Alex Long, lost a sister to gun violence. He sees a neighborhood ready for peace.

“The residents want change,” says Long. “They’re tired of the gunfighting.”

And that speaks to the VI’s single mission: to stop people from shooting each other. They are not on the street to convince people to stop selling drugs. They don’t “snitch” to the police. They aren’t even there to get someone a job or a bed in a rehab, though they often do. Many staff members have their own history of street life and incarceration and have seen their families affected by gun violence. It’s these close ties to the realities of life in the neighborhood that give the VIs the credibility they need to do their work.

“When we say we’re looking for high-risk individuals, that means we’re looking for the shooters or those who may get shot,” says Carter. “The shooters is a short list ’cause we know all the shooters. But the ones who are going to get shot could be a long list, so it’s important for all of us who work here to know everyone in this neighborhood. Building relationships is key.”

The work is dangerous. VIs at McElderry Park recall a recent workday when they were tipped off about a nearby beef. As they walked around the corner to mediate, they heard gunshots and ducked behind cars for safety. Staff don’t wear bulletproof vests or carry weapons. Respect and the signature black and orange uniform are the VIs’ only protection.

“We really make an effort to hire the correct people because your armor is your credibility,” says Fatiu. “Your credibility doesn’t make you bulletproof but it minimizes a lot of the danger.”

The Safe Streets staff works a 40-hour week but the hours vary depending on when there are spikes in violence. Each site operates under the auspices of a nonprofit partner, which also helps with programmatic partnerships, providing connections to workforce development programs, for example.

McElderry Park is one of two sites overseen by the Living Classrooms Foundation (LCF). LCF president James Bond explains that while his organization provides everything from job-creation programs to community centers, the biggest issue needs to be addressed head-on. “If you’re really going to disrupt the cycle of poverty, you have to deal with the elephant in the room, the shootings and killings,” says Bond. “And this was a direct way to do it.”

Bill McCarthy, executive director of Catholic Charities, which oversees two other sites, says he appreciates that the program gets to the heart of reversing gun violence.

“It’s critical that we have an understanding not only that gun violence is occurring but the reasons why it’s occurring and how people aren’t equipped in many cases to resolve conflict in ways that are healthier, less traumatic, and, frankly, less irreversible.”

The Safe Streets model is so tied to relationships that Fatiu, now program manager at the Sandtown-Winchester site, one of the city’s largest with 11 employees, almost turned down the job. Fatiu turned his life around while in prison and returned to his community ready to impact youth and save lives, but Safe Streets wanted him to work at McElderry Park and Fatiu was from Park Heights. His passion for the work overrode his misgivings and he’s gone on to work in several Safe Streets sites.

Fatiu says the Safe Streets model can be boiled down to a simple equation: Daily canvasing by VIs plus building rapport in the community multiplied by mediations equals a reduction in shootings and homicides.

“That’s infallible,” Fatiu states. “If a person is doing that, they’ll see results.”

But there’s a second equation that’s just as important.

“Daily canvasing plus community safe walks multiplied by community events, equals community buy-in,” he explains.

Last year, the combined sites conducted more than 226 community events—basketball tournaments, movie screenings in public housing, black-author expos, and Halloween haunted houses. All sites have giveaways of shoes, diapers, backpacks, and other essentials. At McElderry Park, VI Alex Long runs a boxing gym with clinics for kids.

The community buy-in fostered by these events helps workers do their job and models another way of living, one that’s less violent and more communal.

“Safe Streets Baltimore represents an opportunity of redemption for the men and women who do this work,” says Layne, “and they thereby present a mirror for people who are struggling with a way to see themselves out of the chaos. They see someone who’s been in their shoes, who’s done what they’re doing, which gives them the hope and the ability to do things differently.”

Safe Streets maps crime to understand what’s happening in and around its zones. The program says no one takes a conflict outside the zone to settle it elsewhere, hopefully because of residents’ respect for Safe Streets.

“If you’re squashing a beef between two people, they won’t go to the next block to outwit Safe Streets,” says Ganesha Martin, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

The VIs are clear in what they want: more sites and more wraparound services. While jobs alone won’t stop violence—plenty of employed people in America commit violent crimes—an efficient, comprehensive pipeline to resources such as jobs, housing, and drug rehabilitation is needed.

“If someone lives off the gun and he puts the gun down, we may not like to hear it, but we’ve taken away his livelihood,” says Fatiu. “We need to instantly replace it or he’ll pick the gun back up.”

Long, the VI at McElderry Park, says the program is respected and residents expect Safe Streets to deliver on its promises. That means building out more resources.

“In order for Safe Streets to be effective, we need partners,” says Long. “As long as our community is depleted you’ll have spikes in violence.”

A solution may be forthcoming. Martin says she’s currently working to create a single resource to connect those in need.

“With Safe Streets, it’s often an ad hoc response—is there a job here? Do you have some housing over there? That’s not a robust, programmatic response to the violence in our city and we need to do better,” concedes Martin. “I’m working on a service-provider network specifically aimed at providers who can help folks who are stuck in this epidemic of violence.”