Building and Bridging Diverse Neighborhoods in East Baltimore
The President’s
Office of the University of Maryland,
Baltimore, with involvement from
the University’s Schools of Social Work, Medicine, Law, and Nursing, proposes
to undertake a Community Building Initiative in East Baltimore. This Initiative will be a collaborative
effort between the University, the catchment area’s community based organizations,
neighborhood associations and residents, and the City of Baltimore.
The Initiative’s
theme is “diversity as strength,” meaning that the area’s multiculturalism is
an asset, even if not a fully realized one.
The overall focus is to assist the community in acquiring and
implementing key knowledge and skills, which in turn will help with cooperative
community capacity building. The
Initiative has an Education Outreach Component, a Community Engagement
Component, and a complimentary set of Research activities. It includes all, or significant parts of,
these neighborhoods in East Baltimore: Patterson Park, Jonestown, East Harbor
Village, Upper Fells Point, McElderry Park, Baltimore-Linwood, Butcher’s Hill,
Washington Hill and Dunbar-Broadway (see Appendix for map). Community members participate in, and are
represented by, a range of diverse organizations and associations within these
neighborhoods.
Rating Factor 1: Capacity of the Applicant and Relevant Organizational
Experience
A) Knowledge and Experience
The Project Co-Directors will
be Dr. Cheryl Hyde, Dr. Michael Lindsey, and Mr. Dick Cook. Dr. Hyde (MSW, PhD,
Sociology and Social Work) has over 20 years of experience in community
capacity building, diversity-related work and community based research. She is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, where she co-chairs the
Management and Community Organization Concentration, and chairs the Master’s
Program Committee. She is also the
Assistant Director for Community-based Research of the Social Work Community
Outreach Service. Her teaching,
scholarship and community service focus on the areas of building social
capital, neighborhood associations, collaboration and networking, multicultural
organizational development, and community-based research techniques. For the past 3 years, she has been teaching a
community based research course, where the community defines the research
problem, and then she and the students assist the community learn what it wants
through data gathering and analysis.
Three years ago, a community in North Baltimore asked her to help them
evaluate the Charles Village Community Benefits District. The evaluation that resulted assisted the
District in its re-authorization efforts, and it has become the most quoted
document by supporters and opponents alike. Two years ago, Dr. Hyde, with Dr.
Karen Hopkins, ran a research course on “Best Practices of Community Based
Agencies” with the East Baltimore Partnership (part of the proposed catchment
area). Their students assisted community
organizations in developing outcome based measurements for organizational
planning and development. Last year, she
led a student team in examining a resident mobilization effort in Jonestown
(also in East Baltimore). Dr. Hyde serves on a
number of social work journal editorial boards and is currently the President
of the Association of Community Organization and Social Administration. Dr.
Hyde will direct the Initiative’s research activities and assist with efforts
at strengthening the diversity of the community.
Dr. Michael Lindsey (MSW,
PhD, Social Work) will join the School of Social Work’s faculty in Fall 2004. He is currently completing a Post-doctoral
Fellowship at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, W.K. Kellogg Community
Health Scholars Program. In that
capacity, he works in East Baltimore on effective intervention programs for high-risk
African American males. His scholarly
areas of interest include violence prevention among urban youth and community
health assessments. He is a past
recipient of an NIMH Dissertation Award for his work on social network influences
on African American Adolescents. Dr.
Lindsey will work primarily on the Leadership Development objective of this
Initiative and assist with the research activities.
Dick Cook (MSW) is the
current Director of the School of Social Work’s Community Outreach Service
(SWCOS). He is a former Peace Corps
Volunteer in Latin America, and has more than 30 years of experience working with
diverse community based organizations, including the past 25 years in the
target area with Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans and Ethnic
Europeans. For the past 5 years, he has
assisted community organizations in the area successfully tackle issues such as
stopping real estate flipping, strengthening their organizational structures
through Board and Staff training, and raising funds to continue their
efforts. For past several years, he has
assisted the Baltimore American Indian Center to move from a position of
being $200,000 in debt and closing its doors, to one of eliminating its debt
and raising more than $200,000, to renovating its building and raising $45,000
to hire new staff. Mr. Cook directed the
COPC program in West Baltimore and will direct the community outreach activities for
this project.
The Project Manager, Randa
Deacon (MSW, MS economics), will dedicate at least 60% time to this
Initiative. She has three years
experience working on the West Baltimore COPC project and four years working in
East
Baltimore with the groups involved in this New Directions effort. She helped homeowners in the area, faced with
relocation resulting from a major new development, move from a position of
being offered $3000 for their property to being offered more than $70,000. She supported public housing tenants in the
area in getting the City’s attention regarding their maintenance issues. And she has assisted several organizations in
the area to develop more effective organizational structures. She will be based in the community and work
with the community partners in developing their strategies and activities, and
she will oversee reports and record-keeping for the project. She will also supervise a graduate Student
Intern assigned to the project.
Andrea Judson (MSW, LCSW-C),
part time Community Organizer on this Initiative, has worked for the past five
years in the target area. She has helped groups in the area collaborate with
each other in order to provide more effective services. She also has assisted tenants of one public
housing project design and secure $100,000 to build a new playground to replace
the one that was broken down and used by drug dealers; the new one is now the
territory of parents and children in the community. Ms. Judson will oversee the community
engagement activities and supervise several graduate student interns who be
assigned to the Initative.
Faculty and Administrative
consultants to the Initiative include:
· Terry Hickey (JD), School of Law, is founder of Community Law
in Action (CLIA), a program affiliated with the Law School, which has provided training
in street law for the past five years to some of the poorest communities in Baltimore including the West Baltimore
Empowerment Zone, COPC project. Dr. Hickey and CLIA recently won a grant and
approval from the Baltimore City School Board to develop an innovative high
school focused on teaching young people skills and knowledge of community
leadership. The Baltimore Freedom Academy has completed its first year
with 100 students, and is relocating to the East Baltimore target area. Dr. Hickey and CLIA will conduct the
Community Advocacy for Youth Trainings.
· Karen Hopkins (MSW, PhD
Social Work), School of Social Work, Co-Chairs the Management
and Community Organization Concentration.
Her specialty is the field of management and organizational development,
with particular emphasis on supervision, learning organizations, personnel
development, and evaluation research.
She has focused her classes on addressing real organizational problems
and co-taught the community research course with Dr. Hyde that worked in our
target area two years ago. She will
assist with the organizational development and research aspects of the project.
· James Kunz (MSW, PhD
Economics & Social Work), School of Social Work, has worked with
Baltimore’s poorest communities from the time he was an MSW student and interned
with the Maryland Food Committee, which helped poor communities organize around
increasing the availability of food. Two
years ago, Dr. Kunz led a community-wide project with Baltimore County’s Community Action Agency,
involving hundreds of community representatives in developing policy papers on
the county’s most pressing issues for the incoming County Executive. He will assist the project by working with
community groups to help them understand the economic impact of various
strategies and activities. He will be
particularly helpful as the project develops strategies for affordable housing
and in providing expertise in cost effectiveness measures.
· Mary Leach (PhD Mathematics),
Office of the President, has chaired the Community Advisory Board of the West Baltimore
COPC and served as a Board Member of one of the Village Centers. Along with a
community representative, she will serve as Co-chair of this Initiative’s
Community Advisory Committee. Dr. Leach
also created and leads the Covering Kids Project, an effort to secure health
insurance for uninsured children in Maryland. She will serve as the Liaison to the
President’s Office on this project as well as advising participating community
organizations on resource access issues.
· Megan Meyers (MSW, PhD Social
Welfare), School of Social Work, has worked in the target area for the past
three years, assisting groups in
developing planning strategies and using available data resources to solve
their problems. She teaches community
organizing, social action and community economic development courses at the
school. Her specialty is in the area of
conflict resolution. Two years ago, she
worked with Randa Deacon on an effort that produced a successful new community
organization in East Baltimore, which then secured a substantial increase in the
amount of money being offered for their homes.
This past year, she led a successful workshop which trained 50 community
residents in techniques of alternative dispute resolution. She will assist community partners in developing
strategies for community building and will facilitate trainings on conflict
resolution between various groups and organizations.
· Mitsuko Nakashima (MSW, PhD Social
Work), School of Social Work, specializes in aging and
cultural diversity. She currently
is a Hartford Geriatric
Social Work Faculty Scholar Fellowship.
For this project, she will assist primarily with strategies to end
isolation among the catchment area’s senior citizens.
· Larry Ortiz (MSW, PhD
Sociology), School of Social Work, specializes in outreach to
and political mobilization of the Latino population. He also has an interest in housing
development and on the impact of policy on the local level. He will be
assisting primarily with resident engagement activities.
· Barbara Sattler (RN, DrPH) School of Nursing, Director of the Environmental Health Education Center at the school. She is the Principle Investigator on a
“Healthy Homes Initiative” working to eliminate lead hazards in Park Heights. She is also the Principle Investigator for Community
Outreach on an EPA hazardous waste site grant.
She has worked for the past 10 years with Baltimore’s communities most affected
by environmental degradation. Over the
past five years she has organized an environmental task force in South Baltimore which has worked to reduce
environmental hazards. She has worked
for the past three years in the targeted communities. She will assist the community partners in
understanding the environmental health issues and what communities can do to
protect themselves.
· Dan Schulze (PhD), School of Medicine, teaches Molecular
Immunology. Dr. Schulze is the Faculty
Advisor to a group of medical students who have organized themselves as the
Baltimore Community for Medical Outreach, which provides voluntary health education
to Baltimore communities. The committee will be available for health
care workshops and community educational activities on topics the community
requests. This will dovetail well with
the work on environmental hazards.
· Steve Soifer
(MSW, PhD Social Policy), School of Social Work, teaches economic
development, community organizing and social action. One of his areas of focus is affordable
housing, specifically the establishment of land trusts. He will assist the project in strategizing
long-term affordable housing options.
B)
Past Performance
Achievement of specific measurable outcomes:
Upon notice of the initial
COPC grant, the Project Director was given 24 hours to get to a national COPC
Conference in St. Louis. During his absence, the local newspaper
contacted the President’s Office about the award. The resulting article made no mention of
community partners, who became so infuriated with this oversight that the
Project Director (upon his return) asked HUD about the process for returning
the grant. In an effort to salvage the
project, a respected city official was engaged to mediate. This process was successful, but it set the
project timeline back by about six months.
Despite this slow start, the project was able to meet and in many cases
exceed it goals.
The “West Baltimore
Empowerment Zone Initiative” was composed of University partners and four
Village Centers in the Empowerment Zone – Washington Village/Pigtown,
Poppleton, Harlem Park, and Sandtown. The following is a summary of the Goals,
Outcome Goals, and Outcomes Achieved for the COPC Grant from 1999 to 2003
(includes 2 extension years):
·
Goal 1:
Increase the involvement, organization and mobilization of community
residents and their resources to deal with problems or issues.
·
Outcome Goal: recruit 200 residents to become
involved in Village Center
activities (e.g. community clean-ups, community fairs, safety patrols,
neighborhood watches) by June 2000.
·
Outcome Achieved: recruited 350 residents by
June 2000.
·
Outcome Achieved: recruited more than 4000 residents by
December 2003.
·
Goal 2: Increase community capacity to
identify and respond to community issues.
·
Outcome Goal: identify and involve 25 leadership
prospects from the community by December 1998.
·
Outcome Achieved: identified and involved 15
leadership prospects by December 1998.
·
Outcome Achieved: identified and involved more
than 100 leadership prospects by December 2001.
·
Goal 3: Increase in employment and
community development.
·
Outcome Goal: create job seekers identification
and placement programs by December 1998.
·
Outcome Achieved: created the first job seekers
identification and placement program in Washington Village/Pigtown by December
1998.
·
Outcome Achieved: created programs in each of
the 4 Village Centers by June 1999.
·
Outcome Goal: place 200 applicants in jobs each year
by December 1999
·