After spending five years running an after-school program at Collington Square Elementary/Middle School, Julia Di Bussolo realized something was missing.

“I got to meet so many amazing students and families and community leaders and was able to weave in a lot of the arts into that program,” she says—but it didn’t feel like enough.

She appreciated the intersectionality of arts and community and wanted to see what she could do outside of what the structured school day was allowing. So, when she saw the executive director job posting for Arts Every Day, a strategic partner to the Baltimore City school district that advances equitable access to the arts, it was everything she was looking for.

“It seemed like an opportunity to really address some of the systemic challenges that I had seen students and their families face.”

Since becoming director in August 2012, Di Bussolo has grown the organizational budget to over $1.5 million and expanded the annual program reach by providing thousands of students with arts experiences like artist residencies and performances, purchasing over $100,000 in musical instruments, kilns, and arts equipment, and organizing student exhibitions.

Arts Every Day’s goal is that “every Baltimore City student has access to a transformative arts education that prepares them to be artists, leaders, advocates, makers, and supporters of the arts,” she says.

It also supports teachers who are providing art integration, provides access to arts and cultural programming across the city, and promotes Baltimore City students as artists and creatives. There is also a youth arts council that works to make sure that the “youth voice isn’t lost in the sauce when it comes to looking at systemwide issues related to arts access.” Di Bussolo took that group to Annapolis in March to meet with lawmakers and to testify before the appropriations committee.

The work is important to her not just as an art lover but a mom, too.

“My son has grown up over the course of these years and he’s a student in Baltimore City Public Schools and has been since kindergarten. So, you know, I see my role as an outside advocate, but also as a parent in the school system.”

When Jennie Janssen saw a television show about sharks as a kid, her initial reaction was not fear, but fascination. The Silver Spring native dreamed of one day working with these infamously finned fish. Today she’s the assistant curator of the Blue Wonders exhibit at the National Aquarium, where she and her team oversee sharks, skates, rays, jellyfish, and more.

Throughout her career, however, she noticed the staff in her field was not as diverse as the animals. So in 2021, Janssen, who is Chinese-American, co-founded Minorities in Aquarium and Zoo Science (MIAZS) with her colleague, Meghan Holst, an octopus scientist at UC Davis. The nonprofit, which has 182 members and counting, provides access to professional networks, career resources, and scholarship opportunities.

You started your career in the South, most recently at the Georgia Aquarium. When you moved here over a decade ago, what made the National Aquarium enticing to you?
My husband and I are both from Maryland. He grew up in Baltimore, behind the old Memorial Stadium. This was our hometown aquarium. My family would go all the time. I remember standing inside Shark Alley, watching the sand tigers swim by. There was something electric, watching them—they’re so slow and right in front of your face; they gave me the willies! But they’re also beautiful and powerful. That was pivotal for me.

Throughout your education and career, mentorship played an important role for you, with certain professors inspiring you to pursue your passion. When did you realize that knowledge sharing was a strength of yours as well?
In college, I realized that there is the learning of knowledge, there is the use of knowledge, and then there’s the teaching of knowledge. There came a point where I thought, I can learn this, and I can do this, but if I don’t share it with anybody else, how much good is it doing?…My mentor at the Tennessee Aquarium was a turning point for me, the environment he created. [He would say,] “Don’t let anybody tell you that you are too young to do this work. And don’t be limited by what has been done before. Do the best that you can do….”

My family was very distraught about me having this unpaid internship, rightly so, but he wrote to them on official letterhead and told them about the work I was doing. It changed their support—and paved the way for me.

In 2021, you co-founded MIAZS. Tell me about your experience witnessing a lack of diversity in your field.
Throughout my career, the vast majority of people that I encountered were white. I love these people, they are my professional family, but there were almost no other people of color. Getting into our field is tricky in and of itself. There are all kinds of challenges. Then when none of the people mentoring you [look like you]….And on top of that, there are a variety of cultures that say this is not a career you should pursue like immigrant families, where there’s pressure to be a doctor, or engineer, or lawyer. And then there’s the socio-economic divide within this country.

As you alluded to, this can be a career of passion, which isn’t practical for everyone. How does MIAZS aim to address this?
There’s a level of access to even begin. And part of what we’re trying to do with MIAZS is demystify the process of getting into these careers. We’re trying to identify how managers are selecting candidates. What do they like to see on a résumé? What resources do they trust? What programs are out there? And then in turn, we work with aspiring professionals on their résumés and cover letters.

You’re never going to get the job without the interview, and if your résumé doesn’t get you the interview, it doesn’t matter. How do you find all of that out? By having a network. So we created one….Across the board, it’s about access. We want the information to be out there. And there’s no membership fee because we don’t want a financial barrier to be part of this community. And the community that has been created through MIAZS is incredibly humbling. Last fall, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums had its annual conference and there were so many MIAZS members there, from all over.

This year, you’re launching a new professional development scholarship that includes coaching and a capstone project. What inspired this program?
There are only a few opportunities for managerial training within our professional circles. And it’s something that’s really helpful in this career, because if you’re really good at taking care of animals, eventually you become a people manager, too. And it’s like, I have a lot of experience with sharks and rays and jellyfish, but I don’t know about primates. In terms of job training, often you are just perpetuating what came before you. So to intentionally think about: What are some tools and best practices for working with homo sapiens, and for being a good and effective leader to support your people so that they can support the animals? The managers are the ones who are hiring the next generation.

What’s a long-term goal for MIAZS?
Our dream is to start a program that connects with middle-schoolers. That’s the age where they’re dreaming about what they want to be when they grow up. We want them to know these are legitimate careers. And that there’s a variety of kinds of people who do this work, all to support that larger mission of the conservation of animal species and their habitats.

Sande Riesett had a comfortable job in advertising when, in 2011, she heard about a horrifying case of animal abuse in Baltimore. And then another, and another.

All three involved cats or dogs being tortured or killed—by children.

“I was so appalled,” says Riesett, “I couldn’t even function. As somebody who grew up with dogs and cats, I couldn’t imagine anybody doing this to an animal, let alone a child. So I wanted to do something. I had to do something.”

After Riesett met Caroline Griffin, an anti-animal-abuse advocate, the two formed Show Your Soft Side (SYSS), which began as an awareness campaign using posters in the Baltimore Public School system.

“The idea was to feature true tough guys showing a soft side for their cats and dogs,” she says of the posters, which featured sports stars with their pets, including Orioles players Adam Jones and Manny Machado and Ravens players Jarret Johnson, Ronnie Stanley, and Daniel Faalele.

The organization, which became a nonprofit in 2013, has expanded its services to include a hotline for tips leading to the arrest of animal abusers. They’ve also established funds for emergency medical care for cats dumped or born on the streets, and to help support Maryland rescues, especially in the wake of COVID-19, when many shelters became inundated with abandoned pets.

Run entirely by volunteers, SYSS operates mostly in Baltimore City, but also sends materials to schools, teachers, and youth groups around the country, and has set up pet adoption events in markets other than Baltimore.

“I feel really proud,” says Riesett, who adopted three former street cats, “because we are small, we’re all-volunteer, and we’ve been able to pivot quickly if we see a need.”

Since 1978, TurnAround has been providing support to victims of sexual assault and intimate partner violence in Baltimore County.

Angeles Evans first came to the organization as an intern in 2011, when she was getting her degree in social work at Morgan State. A first-generation college graduate, Evans identifies as a secondary survivor of domestic violence.

“I grew up in a home where there was intimate partner violence.” At TurnAround, she says, “I started to really engage with the work and find a lot of language for things that I had seen growing up. It felt like a very purposeful journey.”

TurnAround, which also serves Baltimore City and Howard County, offers aid to child survivors and victims of sexual trafficking, and is the designated rape crisis center for both Baltimore City and County. All of their services are free.

Evans left TurnAround for a few years to work at a law firm, where she got real-life experience coordinating legislation for young people facing homelessness, and then returned to the organization to lead her old department.

Today, as TurnAround’s senior manager of community engagement and training, Evans pilots the agency’s prevention-training program, which also supports law enforcement officers, school faculty, and other service providers to identify the signs of abuse and help those affected respond to it.

“The work has grown so much,” she says. “We’re helping survivors tell their stories in a way that doesn’t re-traumatize them.”

As part of that effort, Evans oversees TurnAround’s annual Purple Poetry Book, a collection of survivor stories and artwork that is now in its 15th year and that culminates in a release party during Violence Awareness Month in October.

“We invite all those who are vocal to come, and sometimes it’s the survivors’ first time sharing their story in a public setting.”

After her brother was killed by a drunk driver, Kelli Brooks (pictured) thought she was “going crazy.” She had no idea that grief could manifest in both physical and mental ways. She now says it was “divine intervention” that brought her to Roberta’s House, a family grief support center.

After witnessing the disparity of unresolved grief and loss in urban communities, Annette March-Grier co-founded Roberta’s House in 2008 along with her family, the owners of March Funeral Home, to address the needs of grief, especially in children. The grief center was named after the March family’s matriarch, the late Julia Roberta March.

For Brooks, being able to work through her heartache saved her life and now, as the community outreach coordinator, she sees firsthand how vital it is to have children be part of the conversation.

“It’s really important to involve kids and really teach them, at their level, what grief is, what death is, and how it can impact their lives.”

This is all done through peer support groups, educational workshops, community outreach, and Camp Erin, held every summer. Created and supported by The Moyer Foundation (now Eluna), Camp Erin is the largest national bereavement program for youth. Children and teens attend a weekend camp experience that combines traditional camp activities with grief support, free of charge for families.

The importance of both Roberta’s House and Camp Erin is “recognizing that they’re not alone,” says licensed clinical social worker Aneesha Scott, behavioral health program clinical director for Roberta’s House and Camp Erin Baltimore. “And even when you’re grieving, you can still have fun, you can still laugh, you can still engage with others,” she says, adding that kids learn healthy coping strategies as well.

Last year, Roberta’s House helped more than 250 children, thanks to countless trained volunteers, in ways that let them heal at their own pace.

“Grief looks different for everyone, especially at different ages,” says Scott. “So, somebody comes in and they’re not able to necessarily talk. Sometimes they have to write it. Sometimes we have to do art projects. Sometimes we have to go play in the game room….You have to meet them where they are until they’re ready to tell their grief story.”

Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB) was founded 33 years ago on the belief that people with disabilities should have equitable access to meaningful and therapeutic recreation. Last year, the nonprofit adaptive sailing organization opened a state-of-the-art, $6.3 million open-air pavilion and 2,600-square-foot learning center in Annapolis.

Founded by Annapolis local Don Backe after a car accident left him paralyzed, CRAB has enabled thousands of individuals with disabilities to experience the joy of sailing. Today, life-long boater Paul “Bo” Bollinger, who founded the Wounded Warrior Sailing Regatta in Annapolis a dozen years ago, leads the organization. He talks about it below.

Let’s start with the incredible, and beautiful, new facility in Annapolis. It is quite a change from the old location at Sandy Point State Park.
That’s the one big comment we have received from guests—that the facility is beautiful. We designed it that way with intention. It is just a fact that most of the people with disabilities are used to secondhand or hand-me-down type of equipment and facilities. When they come here, things are different. The people who run the Challenged Sailors San Diego program came and said it was like coming to Oz

How long did it take to raise the money and put the financial deal for the land and construction together?
Waterfront property in Annapolis is not cheap real estate. The CRAB board made the decision to start looking for a new facility when we went from four boats to six in 2017. We had filled the floating dock at Sandy Point State Park. We hoped to be in Annapolis, although we looked throughout Anne Arundel County. Finally, we found a property and marina that the owners were interested in selling, and then we worked with them over many lemonades shared on the front porch, talking with them about our plans and the process that we had to go through to acquire the property.

One thing that happened was that we were able to get County Executive Steuart Pittman to agree to use Program Open Space funds to acquire the property. The city of Annapolis came in with $500,000 and we received a capital improvement project grant from [then] Gov. Hogan. We were able to put together the remaining piece of the $2.25 million acquisition price. The owner never believed I would be successful. Never.

And how important was it to be in Annapolis?
It is a very nice area to sail here, of course. We’re predominantly in the Severn River. But we can go out to the Bay and we participate in the annual CRAB Cup, which goes all the way across the Bay and up to the Bay Bridge before it comes back to the starting line. If the winds are very high, we can sail in Back Creek. There are a lot of our volunteers who live in the area, too—although we do draw volunteers from as far away as Delaware. We also have a D.C. contingent of skippers and volunteers from all over Maryland. And then we also have the guests with disabilities—about 80 percent are probably Marylanders—but we draw from Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, all over the region.

The Beneteau boats in your fleet are remarkable. Custom-made, so that guests can be involved in the actual sailing, correct?
They’ve been custom-modified for our guests who need to be assisted in getting into the boat. They also have racing-car bucket seats in them with four-point harness belts and the main sheet has been moved out of the cockpit, which creates space for two chairs.

This is an active sailing program for the guests, correct?
Yes, we don’t take guests for rides. Sometimes it takes a little coaxing, but we’re like, “You’re going to sail this boat. We’re going to put your hand on the tiller.” The boat seats are arranged so that if a person’s strong hand is their right or if it’s their left, we can seat them so that they can put it on the tiller and control the sailing of the boat. If there are other guests onboard, then they would control the jib sheet.

It must be a tremendous feeling to be on the water for people who use a wheelchair. Many, I assume, have never sailed previously.
There’s one story that almost brings tears to my eyes every time I share it. I was in the office working, and one of our young skippers—and we don’t have a lot of young ones, we’re always looking for those—calls me. He says, “Hey, I wanted to let you know that I just took a young guy out sailing.” And he says they were sailing near the Bay Bridge when our guest with disabilities turned and looked at him and said, “I want you to know that I really appreciate you taking me the farthest I have ever been from my wheelchair and the memories that put me in it.”

While Amy Greensfelder was an undergraduate theology student—with the intent to eventually become a pastor—her career took an unexpected turn.

“I realized I was agnostic,” she says.

But that “aha” moment was soon followed by another when a mentor suggested she consider a related career in social services. So, after graduating in 2007, Greensfelder worked as an immigration counselor before becoming a caseworker with refugees in Nairobi, Kenya.

“As part of my work, I’d ask people why they’d left their home countries they could never return to, while also seeing the impact of hearing that trauma among my colleagues,” says Greensfelder. “There was pain on both sides and not a lot of resources for either group. Through this work, I saw a need for mental health support.”

By 2017, Greensfelder graduated with a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. And after completing her degree, she was hired as the executive director for Pro Bono Counseling, a nonprofit organization that matches Marylanders who have limited or no health insurance to an appropriate counselor for free ongoing therapy sessions.

With some 805 licensed volunteer therapists, Pro Bono Counseling provides more than 10,000 hours of free services to those in need per year, whether the issues are related to relationships, anxiety, or depression.

While the nonprofit was founded in 1991, Greensfelder, 38, has not only grown the staff from four to 15, she’s expanded services including a free “warm line” that anyone (regardless of need) can call to speak with a counselor. In short, there’s nothing else like it on a state level.

Despite the progress, Greensfelder says there’s wider work to be done.

“We want to continue to be this resource in the community for people who have nowhere else to turn,” she says, “but we have the bigger goal of raising awareness of how large an issue there is around gaining access to mental health care….Hopefully, we can influence the system to change so that everyone in Maryland can get access to mental health care.”

When Jen Rifkin stayed in Baltimore after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art, she was set on becoming an art teacher.

“I ended up teaching for 10 years in Baltimore and Randallstown,” says Rifkin.

While working with kids was her passion, she was constantly feeling like she was up against frustrating restrictions.

“There were limitations to what I really could do for kids, the difference I could make, and the control that I had over that.”

Like many teachers, Rifkin also was working a second job, in her case as a part-time staff member at Volo, a group that provides adult sports leagues in the city. And by extension, she was volunteering with their nonprofit, the Volo Kids Foundation.

Founded by Giovanni Marcantoni in 2015 following civil unrest sparked by racial disparities felt across the city, the group provides kids the opportunity to access play, something they were frequently left out of due to barriers like cost and transportation. Rifkin, who was named executive director in February 2022, was hooked.

“I was attracted to the idea of working in the nonprofit sector and being able to really control and grow my impact and make a difference for kids here in Baltimore.”

The now-national organization has grown from a small free flag football league in Herring Run to over 45,000 kids playing multiple sports under the guidance of almost 10,000 volunteers.

“The idea was to provide a space for positive socialization, a way for kids to get active, but truthfully, and most importantly, just a space to play and have fun,” says Rifkin. “It’s so hard to be a kid these days—they have social pressures, physical pressures, emotional pressures, and virtual pressures that did not exist when I was a kid. And the cool thing about play is it teaches the life skills that kids need to be resilient to those pressures, but kids can’t tell they’re learning. They’re just having fun.”

Rifkin has learned the power that comes from the joy of play.

“It’s so valuable—in that moment, they’re also learning confidence and resiliency, trust, and safety. Play is that secret weapon that teaches these things all rolled into one. And every single child has the right to that power.”

Brothers Ali and Atman Smith and their best friend Andrés “Andy” González used to sit on their stoop on North Smallwood Street in West Baltimore in the early 2000s and see kids from surrounding blocks sowing mayhem in the neighborhood.

They’d steal bikes, break windows, throw road salt everywhere, use parked cars as playground equipment—you name it. The kids were no more than 11 or 12 years old, but sometimes the trouble got more serious. Potentially violent “wars,” as the kids labeled them, would flare up against boys living on the other side of North Avenue.

Ali, Atman, and Andy—the “A Team,” as their friends would come to call them—didn’t react to the kids the way many adults did. All three had just graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, so they were still pretty young themselves. They didn’t think punishment or possibly calling the police was the answer. Instead, they proposed a radical solution for how to address what was ailing these young people: yoga.

“Everybody’s eyes lit up like, what the hell?” recalls Ra’Mon Brown, one of those neighborhood boys, now age 30. “‘Hell, no. We ain’t doing no yoga…That’s for girls, we’re not doing that, that’s weak!’”

But Brown and about 10 of his buddies were already starting to look up to the A Team as role models who seemed to understand them. Ali, Atman, and González piled some of them into Atman’s Toyota Corolla to take them to the Y in Druid Hill. After swimming and playing basketball, the boys found themselves invited into the dance studio of the Y, where their role models—large, athletic men, including a former Terps basketball player (Atman)—were floating the idea of…yoga?

“They were like, man, give it a try,” Brown says. The boys tentatively followed Atman in some breathing exercises, some poses, some meditating. Soon, “it’s blowing our mind,”

Brown says. He started noticing a change in himself almost immediately.

“I’m feeling my muscles getting stronger, I’m feeling my lungs getting better. Afterward I felt great…like it was nothing in the world that could make me angry or upset. I felt like I could leave out and go skip down the street and be happy.…And then a week later, I noticed when I was meditating, I came to a realization, like, yo, I need to start to think before I do things.”

As trendy as yoga may have become in recent years, it has deep roots in some Baltimore neighborhoods. In their early boyhoods on North Smallwood Street, Ali and Atman learned about meditating and yoga from their father, Meredith “Smitty” Smith, and their godfather, “Uncle” Will Joyner. Smitty and Joyner had both been Black Panthers. For them, spiritual practices like yoga were ways for the community to take care of itself against sometimes-hostile outside forces.

During college, Ali and Atman began spending more time with Joyner, and their interest deepened. González, their college friend, shared their growing fascination. They’d be over at Joyner’s house, watching a basketball game, “and then he would break out a [yoga] practice on us,” Ali recalls.

“In the middle of watching a basketball game and drinking beer, he would break out like the breath of fire [breathing technique] and talk about how it was good for getting rid of toxins in your body… We were like, what is wrong? Can’t we just chill and watch the basketball game?”

But the young men were intrigued. They asked Joyner to lead them on a deep dive into yoga. He told them that if they were serious, they should report back to his house at 4:30 a.m. to begin. He also warned, according to Atman, who repeats Joyner’s words and tone of voice: “I ain’t training no dee-vo-tees. I’m training teachers!” Meaning: Whatever the young men learned, they would have to share it with the community. “And that’s where our journey began,” Atman says.

After that first session at the Y, Ali, Atman, and González knew they were onto something that could make a difference in Baltimore and beyond. The mindfulness work with neighborhood children at the Y, as well as at a local elementary school, were early tests of the A Team’s theory that this ancient practice could have renewed relevance in neighborhoods not known for a proliferation of yoga studios.

They founded the Holistic Life Foundation in late 2001 to introduce children, especially, but also adults, to mindfulness practices that could help them cope with stress and anger and begin to heal emotional traumas in their lives.

The need was especially great, the trio surmised, in neighborhoods already struggling with poverty, gun violence, drug addiction, and systemic racism. They believed they could raise the level of inner peace—and therefore outer peace—in families, on blocks, in schools, in neighborhoods, maybe even in entire cities, one mindful child at a time.

“We saw the difference it was making in us, in our lives, and we wanted to really help people help themselves,” González says, sitting with Ali and Atman one February morning in a co-work space they use in a converted church in Baltimore City.

“It’s actually giving people tools and techniques to empower them to heal their trauma, whether it’s trauma that’s stored in the body…or they live in a traumatic situation where their outward environment is chaotic and they need to learn how to develop an inner peace,” Atman says.

“WE SAW THE DIFFERENCE IT WAS MAKING IN US, IN OUR LIVES, AND WE WANTED TO REALLY HELP PEOPLE HELP THEMSELVES.”

Since those early days, the three founders estimate the Holistic Life Foundation has offered yoga and mindfulness training to about 100,000 youths and adults, mainly in Baltimore, but also in other parts of the U.S. and in other countries. Dozens of the foundation’s former students—including Brown—kept up their personal practices and later came to work for the foundation as yoga specialists themselves. (The foundation currently has a staff of 44.)

They were teaching about 10,000 children per week in the Baltimore City Public Schools before the pandemic disrupted programming, according to the foundation. Now the total is about 4,200 in the schools, including those accessing an online platform, with plans to try to serve more.

A few years ago, a chance encounter at a mindfulness conference in New York led to the foundation creating a satellite program for about 700 students in the Akwesasne territory of the Mohawk Nation in upstate New York and Canada. In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative of the Clinton Foundation named Holistic Life part of its “commitments to action” effort, which this year is helping Holistic Life establish programs for a total of 2,100 students in schools in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Denver.

“Traditionally when people think about mindfulness or yoga, it is largely thought of as this white privileged activity that young gentrifiers do,” says City Councilman Zeke Cohen, who sponsored the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act in 2020 to bring trauma-informed
training to city agencies. “But what Ali and Atman and Andy have proven is that mindfulness is for everyone and that there is a way of using it to address and to heal trauma that is actually beautiful.”

Holistic Life has been providing mindfulness lessons to thousands of city librarians and Recreation and Parks employees under the Healing City program, Cohen says, and the foundation will work with other agencies as well is a hard thing to measure, but results have been promising.

After Monique Debi, former principal of Fort Worthington Elementary/Middle School in East Baltimore, introduced Holistic Life’s mindfulness program at the school in 2017, the number of suspensions dropped from 180 the previous year to 17 by 2020, even though the number of students doubled to nearly 1,000 in the same period, according to Debi.

“We were faced with a huge mountain that my staff and I would not have been able to ascend without [Holistic Life’s] support,” Debi says. “We knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t know how to do it. They really came in with the how.”

How Holistic Life does it is through what the founders call the Mindful Moment. The school day may begin with a guided meditation over the public address system that takes many forms. A meditation on love might invite the students and staff first to think about those they love and mentally send love to them. Then they should think about someone they don’t love and mentally send them love anyway. Finally they should remember to send themselves love, because self-love and self-care are essential as well.

A Mindful Moment room in a school will be set aside as a retreat space, staffed by a mindfulness specialist and equipped with yoga mats, comfortable chairs, soft lights, and perhaps an oil diffuser to produce soothing aromas.

“It’s an oasis in the school,” Atman says. “We talk to them about their stresses, how the stress plays out in their body, whether they clench their fist, clench their jaw, fold their arms.”

Students learn breathing techniques and stretches to practice the next time they feel stressed out, along with a self-awareness about the impact and sources of stress. Ali adds: “It’s really empowering for young people and for anybody, just the knowledge of what’s going on, and then the ability to not just impulsively fly off the handle, but to just be, oh, okay, that’s what that is, and now I even have a tool to use for it.”

The yoga specialists are on call to visit classrooms, perhaps to lead breathing exercises to help students relax and focus before a test.

“I can tell you that the whole atmosphere, the whole vibe, everything changes because it gives the kids a different way to handle their emotions,” says Leonie Duhaney, a fifth-grade math and science teacher at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School. “It helps them to deescalate, and it helps the kids to focus better in class.”

Vance Benton, former principal of Patterson High School, instituted the Mindful Moment program in 2012 after he took a survey and found that the vast majority of his students had experienced at least two deaths of people close to them. They were suffering from what Benton called “present traumatic stress disorder.”

“EVERYTHING CHANGES BECAUSE IT GIVES THE KIDS A DIFFERENT WAY TO HANDLE THEIR EMOTIONS.”

Soon after the program began, he saw a student meditating and practicing breaths outside the Mindful Moment room in a crowded hallway during the transition between classes. The students streaming by took no notice of the young meditating man, which told Benton that mindfulness practices were becoming normalized in the school’s culture.

“I knew the program was working because of the students themselves—students’ behaviors, students’ understanding…You started to see a change. You started to see teachers take their class to the Mindful Moment room. You started to hear students ask me, did I do my mindfulness today?” says Benton, who recently left Patterson to become chief operating officer of Holistic Life.

Jamar Peete was in the fourth grade at Windsor Hills Elementary/Middle School when he learned yoga from the A Team.

“It wasn’t until I did yoga and mindfulness that I had absolute silence, or just quiet, or just actually sat still,” says Peete, now 33, who sells medical devices for wound care in Virginia Beach.

The focus he developed made him a better student and a better baseball pitcher in elementary school, he says, and he taught yoga and meditation to his teammates on the lacrosse team at Limestone University in South Carolina. “It’s still one of my most powerful tools to this day,” he says.

On a recent afternoon in late February at Edgewood Elementary School, a couple dozen students on yoga mats are stretching and breathing deeply and audibly in the manner of budding yogis. Brown, their instructor, quizzes them on the purpose and potential of each move.

“Somebody give me the benefit of the belly breath,” Brown says. “It helps you stay calm and focused!” a boy in the fourth grade sings out.

The session is part of an after-school program that Holistic Life runs at Edgewood called Holistic Me, where about 80 students receive both academic enrichment and yoga four days a week. Most of the students stay engaged for the full 45 minutes of yoga. Brown and another instructor reward mindful behavior by generously dispensing colorful paper—aka “Mindful Bucks” that can be exchanged later for prizes or treats.

“With every inhale I just want you to see yourself pulling in peace, positivity, and love,” Brown says during a final exercise. “With every exhale I want you to see yourself letting go of any anger, any stress, anything that’s holding you back from being great.”

After the session, Brown thinks back to when he was the age of these elementary-schoolers. Without the practice he learned from Ali, Atman and González, “I would have been dead or in jail, I promise you,” he says. “It transformed my life.” Now he’s married, with children of his own.

Another instructor, Anaije Hamilton, 21, first encountered yoga as a student at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School. “My attitude was very bad, my mouth was very bad, I was just short-tempered,” she says. The yoga program “helped me to really calm down and center myself and think about things before I say them.…I even taught my grandmother and my uncles things that I learned.”

To the A Team, stories like Brown’s and Hamilton’s show the potential for the confidence and calm—and even the bliss—that can be achieved in a makeshift yoga studio to be spread to the community.

“They bring these practices back to their home, to their friends in their neighborhood,” Atman says. “Not only does the school change, but the neighborhood environments change as well because when they see somebody who’s suffering, they’ll give them the practice to help them out.”

Just like Ali, Atman, and González, the students can become informal trainers themselves, not just “dee-vo-tees.”

“These are skills that, once you get them, no one can take them from you,” Atman says. “This is about taking these practices off the mat and into the rest of your life.”

Jillian Mills first got into photography, she says, because she wanted to “record everything” about life.

“My mom was the memory keeper in our family—I caught that bug.”

Married to a Marine, Mills’ first images were of military homecomings and deployments, and sometimes featuring military spouses. When those subjects started having children, she segued into taking family photographs and portraits of babies.

By 2012, her business—Heartlove Photography—was born. Since that time, the bread and butter of Mills’ work has been photographing young families.

“I have always loved children and babies,” says Mills, 36. “It’s just one of those things.”

Despite the mostly upbeat nature of her work, she’s all too aware that life doesn’t always go as planned.

“When I started doing homecoming photography and deployment photography, not everyone came home,” says Mills. “I was keenly aware that there aren’t happy endings all the time.”

Given that insight, Mills moved into doing pro bono bereavement photography for families who lost a newborn or experienced a stillbirth.

And while Mills acknowledges that her black-and-white bereavement photos are not for every family, for the people who do decide to have those keepsakes, having something to look back on can be incredibly healing.

“This huge moment happened—birth and death all in the same moment—and you walk out of that hospital room and the rest of the world is still turning,” says Mills. “You’re in this fog of grief and it’s hard to form memories under those conditions.”

Mills says some may not understand why anyone would want a photo of the worst day of their life.

“On the other hand, there’s so much healing, even to look back and be validated that it was real and it was hard—and the love is real.”

When he was an elementary school student in Baltimore, Orioles broadcaster Brett Hollander was diagnosed with dyslexia. He understands how much of a hurdle the disability can be for kids, particularly those with no access to support systems.

Through “Going to Bat For Dyslexia,” a gala fundraising event he began in 2022, Hollander supports kids who are struggling with dyslexia in Baltimore by providing fully paid scholarships to attend a summer program at The Odyssey School, which serves children with language learning differences.

The goal is to show that, given the right academic resources, kids with dyslexia can thrive.

“The key is to figure out how to get through it academically, so you can get through it in the world,” he says.

Saturday Night Live‘s Ego Nwodim talks about improv likes it’s her therapy—or maybe even a form of religion. When she was a student at Eastern Tech High School in Essex, she knew she wanted to act, although her Nigerian-American parents wanted her to be pre-med.

She compromised—leaving Baltimore to study biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the center of the entertainment industry. It was in L.A. where she discovered improv.

“I didn’t even know it existed,” she says from her home in New York City. She immediately fell for the art form that famously encourages “yes and”—an openness to possibility, a generosity in the way you interact with other people, a tool for being present and in the moment.

But it wasn’t just the practice of improv that energized her, it was discovering that such an art form even existed.

“I feel like, as a child, I was aware of very few professional paths available to me,” she says. “So to me, improv represents expanding your horizons. The knowledge that there was this art form out there that’s available to anyone was very empowering.”

After college, she took classes at the Los Angeles chapter of the famous improv troupe, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and did a one woman show, Great Black Women…And Then There’s Me.

She was good at it. So good, in fact, that Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live came a-callin’.

With her adorably scratchy voice, big smile, and gleefully silly impressions, Nwodim became an instant fan favorite. She’s been on the show since 2018 and has also appeared in multiple TV shows, films, and commercials. She’s very much a rising star.

As a sketch comedy show, SNL allows Nwodim to flex some of her improv muscles. But it isn’t actual improv, which uses no script. And she misses it.

“I’m not in the practice of doing improv regularly. When I [was doing it,] I think I was a better person, a better version of myself,” she says. (See? Therapy.)

She notes that it has become an even more crucial life skill at a time when we spend so much of our lives with our noses buried in our phones. It helps to foster better communication, better understanding, and, of course, better listening skills.

In fact, Nwodim is such an improv true believer, she recommends it to friends who aren’t even in showbiz. “I have a friend who is an accountant and I encouraged her to take an improv class!” she says with a laugh.

At some point, she realized that she wanted to bring this art form that she loves to kids, not just to share the life skills that come with improv, but to open their minds to life’s possibilities—that idea that if you see it, you can be it.

“I had people I looked up to in the improv space,” she says. “But I didn’t see many people who looked like me. There’s nothing like seeing someone who looks like yourself and seeing what’s possible for you. There’s just no substitute for that.”

Nwodim wanted to be that person for Baltimore kids. And she knew just who to reach out to.

Back in the mid-aughts, Todd Wade taught Spanish at Eastern Tech High. He remembers Nwodim, who was born in Perry Hall and grew up in White Marsh, as a great kid.

“Ego was a rock-star student,” he says. “She was so driven. She got straight A’s; all fives [the highest score] on her AP exams. But she also was this extreme extrovert, just super happy. She wouldn’t ever walk by a teacher without grinning and saying hi.”

He knew she would succeed in any path she chose. He never worried about her. Eventually Nwodim graduated and he left teaching Spanish to become the director of restorative practices and the peer mediation coordinator at City Springs Elementary/Middle School for the Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP), a nonprofit that operates a series of solutions-based charter schools in Baltimore. Around the time of the George Floyd murder, Wade organized a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally in Baltimore with his son.

“We thought 12 people would show up. It ended up being 3,000,” he says, still somewhat amazed. A white teacher from Baltimore leading people on a BLM march made the news—and it even reached Nwodim in New York.

She reached out to Wade and invited him to come see the show. His first thought: “What show?” Yes, he had no idea she was on SNL. He laughs with embarrassment at the memory.

“I don’t watch TV!” he protests. “I’m not a big pop culture guy.”

But he did go to New York, impressing his friends and family who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get SNL tickets for years.

Of course, he was blown away by Nwodim’s performance that night.

“She’s really good,” he says.

After that, they stayed in touch a little bit. So when, during the writers strike last year, Nwodim came up with this idea to bring improv to Baltimore City schoolchildren, she immediately thought of Wade.

“I reached out to Mr. Wade—I guess I’m supposed to call him Todd now, because I’m an adult,” Nwodim cracks. And she laid out her idea.

It felt a bit like serendipity. Restorative practices is a mindset for how to handle discipline in school, Wade explains.

“It looks for the root causes of behavior.…And it’s a powerful tool to create a school environment where kids know they’re loved.”

Meanwhile, peer mediation is a practice that has students intervening in conflicts. They sit in a circle, they talk and express their feelings. It’s a bit like therapy. And yes, like improv.

Arrangements were made quickly and, last September, Nwodim came back to Baltimore to teach improv to kids at the City Springs Elementary/Middle School in Southeast Baltimore, one of the charter schools run by the BCP.

The improv session itself would take place at Center Stage in Mount Vernon, but first Nwodim stopped by the school to talk to the peer mediators.

“I see myself in you,” she told the assembled group. “I was sitting in seats just like you are and had dreams of doing bigger things. I believe that each of you has inside you what it takes to make your dreams and visions happen. Despite what anyone might tell you…the sky is the limit.”

This message was particularly important to Nwodim. She wanted to show the kids what was possible. Maybe it would be improv. Maybe it would be something else. The idea was to explore and embrace the possibilities. The “yes and” of life.

Terrence Okoh, Taven Williams, and Kayla Austin are all 12-year-old sixth graders at City Springs Elementary/Middle School. They’re also trained peer mediators. They attended Nwodim’s talk at City Springs and then went to Center Stage for the improv session.

Today, they’re gathered in a City Springs classroom to talk about the experience. They confess they didn’t know who Nwodim was when she visited them, but they thought she was funny and cool.

“I was surprised,” Williams says. “Because there aren’t a lot of celebrities from Baltimore.”

The improv work they did that day isn’t necessarily what you might expect. Not scene work, per se, where two people act out a scenario and try to get laughs. It was mostly exercises that teach you to listen and collaborate, which are soft skills implicit in improv.

“One we did was called, ‘Zip, zap, zop,’” Okoh says. “Say if I ‘zip’ to you, you have to ‘zap’ to someone else and they’ve got to ‘zop’ to someone else.”

Wait, what?

“Do you want us to demonstrate for you?”

Okoh says, in an “adults need so much explained to them” voice. So they do, along with Wade, their chairs loudly scraping against the classroom floor as they arrange themselves

into a circle. “Zip,” Okoh says, pointing to Austin. “Zap,” she replies, pointing to Williams. “Zop,” Williams says, pointing to Wade. And around they go. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

“You can’t mess up,” Williams explains.

“And what if you do?” Wade prompts.

“You start all over.”

“You say, it’s all good,” Wade corrects, emphasizing the positive attitude one should bring to the exercise. “And then you start again.”

At Center Stage, they did another exercise that involved counting to 20 with a group of sixth graders. It nearly resulted in a mutiny. In this exercise, everyone sits in a circle (again). But this time, they lock arms, close their eyes, and count to 10. But here’s the rub: “No one can speak at the same time,”

Nwodim says of the exercise. “If two people say four, you have to start over again. So that was very frustrating because it required a level of quiet that I don’t think is inherent to young people. And you need stillness and trust. And so the frustration was that, oh no, two people have said the same number—we were so close and now we have to start over again.”

Some kids bolted from the circle. Others got into shouting matches. But Nwodim kept the whole thing under control.

“Ego was stunning,” Wade says (photographed below, on far left, with students). “She would have been an amazing teacher. A lot of actual teachers would’ve gotten very nervous in that moment. But she was just so patient and good with them.”

Somehow, she managed to corral the kids back to the circle—okay, maybe there was some bribing with Chick-fil-A involved. And they fulfilled the exercise.

“We were supposed to get to 20, but we did 10,” Austin says. But they still felt like they had really accomplished something. Together.

For her part, Nwodim was very impressed by the students. “They were wide open to participating in the games and putting themselves out there,” she says. “[This kind of exercise] is pretty vulnerable. They demonstrated, I think, a level of focus that I wasn’t sure was possible for a group of kids this age. They exceeded my expectations.”

And the City Springs students say the exercises taught them a lot.

“It teaches you to be an active listener,” Williams says, repeating a phrase that Wade uses often in the peer mediation training.

“It taught me to focus,” Okoh says.

“And to pay attention,” echoes Austin.

After the improv session, the kids did a little internet sleuthing to find out about their new hero.

“She was in Good Burger 2!” Okoh says, in awe.

Austin and Williams perk up. “She was?” Williams says.

“Yeah, she played the wife. And she’s in Pizza Hut commercials!”

“I bet she has, like, 12.3 million dollars,” Williams says.

All three say they were inspired by Nwodim’s visit. “It inspired me to do the right thing and not make the wrong decisions,” Okoh says.

“Some people from Baltimore choose the wrong decisions. But Miss Ego came and she talked to us about how to do the right things in life.”

The improv training went so well, and intersected so neatly with the work of the BCP, Nwodim and Wade knew they wanted to continue it. If Nwodim had her druthers, she’d be teaching every single improv class herself—she loves spreading the gospel of improv that much.

“Selfishly, I want to be at every single workshop,” she says. But she knows that’s not possible. So sometime this year, she’s going to come back and teach a group of teachers how to lead improv sessions. Improv will officially become part of the BCP programming. She also plans to take this training to students in New York City. But it’s especially meaningful for her to do this program here at home.

“I’m so happy I was born and raised in Baltimore,” she says. “I always say that I feel like it’s my brag. That I’m from Baltimore.”

She doesn’t get home as often as she’d like, partly because she’s so busy with SNL and other work and partly because her mother sold her childhood home. (“I was devastated.”) But she feels a real connection to the city.

“I held onto my Maryland license an illegal amount of time, because that was my one piece of home,” she says with a laugh. “And when people say they don’t know I’m from Baltimore, I get kind of offended by that. As a performer, I think [being from Baltimore] has given me a bravery and a confidence and a boldness. I like to think I behave like a Baltimore woman.”

When Heather Warnken was named executive director of the University of Baltimore School of Law’s (UBalt) new Center for Criminal Justice Reform (CCJR) at the beginning of 2022, it was a homecoming in more ways than one. Not only was Warnken born and raised in Baltimore and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, but her father, Byron Warnken, spent four decades at UBalt’s School of Law.

“It was always very meaningful for me to come back to Baltimore to this dream job, but the significance of that deepened,” Warnken says, when her father passed away shortly after her appointment.

Warnken, an alum of the U.S. Department of Justice and Berkeley’s Warren Institute, has focused her career on addressing the harm caused by the criminal legal system and promoting healing within marginalized communities, work she continues at CCJR.

“Our mission is to advance public safety and address the harm and inequity caused by the criminal legal system,” says Warnken. “Working toward a more fair and equitable society and criminal legal system will not just address those harms, but will ultimately make us safer.”

This translates into policy reform work and student-facing work at the law school, where they’re training the next generation of lawyers.

“Our student fellows are researching and writing,” says Warnken, “and helping to shape laws in real time in Maryland on these issues. We really view our responsibility to be of service first and foremost in our own backyard.”

Warnken and her crew keep extraordinarily busy—as of April, they’d filed testimony on over two dozen bills, including the Victim Compensation Reform Act of 2024. She describes the center as doing “multi-system, collaborative, problem-solving across what are often such siloed spaces.”

Says Warnken, who was recently named to the Task Force to Study Transparency Standards for State’s Attorneys by Gov. Wes Moore, “I love bringing a collaborative lens to the policy reform work we do.”

Hyesook Chung is celebrating her fifth anniversary with the nonprofit Baltimore Civic Fund (BCF), Baltimore’s best-kept secret when it comes to fiscal sponsorships, program development, and support for youth initiatives.

From financing everyday services like pothole repair and snow cleanup, to larger projects like regional recycling efforts and bridging the digital divide, she has truly made a lasting impact, contributing to a 400-percent growth in BCF’s operating budget.

With a background in social work and philanthropy, Chung approaches her duties with a compassionate and people-centered mindset and has managed over 100 projects in a city filled with limitless potential.

“We’re impacting the way you live and the quality of life here in the city and I just think that’s huge,” she says. “I applaud any leader who just wants to improve the daily lives of all of us.”

As a woman of color who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, Teniola Akinwuntan knows firsthand about the barriers marginalized individuals face.

“Growing up in a community where opportunities were limited fueled my passion to create a platform that provides resources for those who are underserved,” says Akinwuntan.

That personal experience motivated Akinwuntan to found Women of Valor in 2018 to lift up women facing adversity. The Catonsville nonprofit provides food, housing, child-care assistance, and trauma-informed support for victims of domestic violence. It also operates a for-profit workforce training arm, TheeSeeds LLC, that provides career coaching and equips women (and some men) with skills needed to get jobs in hospitality, construction, IT, health care, and other fields.

It serves 7,000 individuals in Baltimore City and eight counties, including Howard, Harford, and Montgomery, working in tandem with the Department of Labor, county job-training programs, and various accrediting boards.

The nonprofit’s work has gotten noticed. In March, the Executive Alliance bestowed Women of Valor with an Honor Roll Award for Women’s Representation, given to establishments that advance women in the workplace. It received the 49th Annual Mayor’s Business Recognition Award, which honors organizations that improve the quality of life for city residents, in December.

“That was a validation of our hard work between our team members and stakeholders and partnerships across the business community,” Akinwuntan says.

For Akinwuntan, the joy in her work also comes from seeing the complete turnaround that women make after using the nonprofit’s services—usually after 90 days.

Depending on the type of services they receive, they might gain employment or move from being homeless into a place of their own.

“On the third month, I see them start to get their ducks in a row and change into a brighter version [of themselves],” Akinwuntan says.