OSI Community Fellows featured in Washington Post Magazine essay

Spring Travel Issue My Travels as a Tourist in My Hometown of Baltimore

Unable to venture abroad, I approached my city as a new destination — and discovered a place of culinary wonders

By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson MARCH 10, 2021

Last spring I was supposed to travel to the west coast of Ireland for work, and while there I planned to return to one of the Aran Islands, Inis Mór, a place I’d visited in my 20s. I have memories of a particular meal, served at a whitewashed cottage perched on the craggy, windswept shoreline. A chef opened her home to one seating a night, and inside the warm, candlelit dining room I ate fish caught that morning and seasoned with dulse from the sea, fennel and potatoes pulled from her garden and warm brown bread served with cheese courtesy of the local goats. I read recently that the culinary offerings on the Aran Islands have prospered, and I could practically taste that meal all over again.

For me, place has always been intricately tied to food. I spent years working in food service, putting myself through college and supporting my early years as a freelance writer. I served hot dogs from a truck, waited tables at fine-dining restaurants and spent a few peripatetic years living on a tour bus, seeing the country as a caterer for rock bands. I learned how to chiffonade and braise, how to pair wines, but most important, I learned how meals made with care resonate with people, and how recipes offer a glimpse into geography, history, politics and culture. When I travel I seek off-the-beaten-path spots where the locals eat — or I talk my way into a private kitchen — because I believe that how we cook, and what we have stocked in our pantries, is one of the surest ways to understand a place and connect with its people and their stories.

I never made it back to Ireland because of the pandemic. Instead, I stayed landlocked in my hometown of Baltimore. My husband set up office in the dining room, my daughter finished third grade online, and our puppy, miffed that everyone was in his space all day, took to eating the rugs. I took to traveling in my head. I reread the books of author Tim Robinson, who drew intricate maps of the Aran Islands, where he lived. Robinson made his home the place of his exploration through a study that has been called a “deep map”: looking not just at what exists on current cartographies, but probing the phyllo layers of history, landscape, nature and folklore. (Sadly, his explorations ended last year in April when he died of covid-19.) As the pandemic circumscribed our movements, I found myself aching for travel, for fresh scenery — for a literal stream in nature, beyond the WiFi-enabled one piped into my home. For me, travel has always meant escaping the city where I live, but what if, like Robinson, I approached Baltimore as the destination? Could I begin to see the landscape of my city again?

My first stop early in the pandemic was a bakery called Motzi Bread, run by husband and wife Russell Trimmer and Maya Muñoz and located in the Harwood neighborhood of north-central Baltimore. When flour disappeared from store shelves last spring owing to global demand, I read a story of a 1,000-year-old mill in England returning to its roots and milling flour. It got me wondering where my flour comes from. At Motzi (pronounced “MOAT-zi”), all of the bread and pastries are made from grains grown in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and milled on-site, making it one of the few storefront bakeries in the country to exclusively use local whole grains.

For my first visit I decided to take the slow path and walk instead of drive. I didn’t follow the grid of sidewalks running aside busy streets, but followed the water. Baltimore is so often portrayed as a city of grit and crime that we can forget its rich topography. It sits in a fertile stretch of the Piedmont Plateau and is laced by rivers and streams sluicing their way to the Chesapeake Bay. Just off the busy four-lane road near my house is a trail that follows a stream called Stony Run.

TOP: Maya Muñoz and Russell Trimmer, owners of Motzi, in Baltimore’s Harwood neighborhood. BOTTOM LEFT: Baking materials at Motzi. BOTTOM RIGHT: “When it comes to something like bread, it should be accessible to people,” says Muñoz.

I emerged from the path at the edge of Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, and from there I cut past the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the outdoor sculpture garden offers a view of Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. In a car Motzi is easy to miss. But walking, the bakery hit me a full block away with the exquisite scent of fresh bread. Then I saw the line of people, about 20 of them, waiting six feet apart on a busy city street. It wasn’t until I turned the corner onto East 28th Street that I saw the bakery itself, tucked into the first floor of an end-of- unit rowhouse. A sign reminiscent of a European shop hangs above the door, and a large glass window affords a view inside the narrow bakery, where a snow shower of flour covered wood tables. Open racks held rising dough in bread pans. I watched as Trimmer opened the door of a professional oven to retrieve several golden-brown loaves with a wood paddle.

Motzi began in 2019 as a subscription-only bread business out of the couple’s kitchen. People signed up for a loaf a week and picked up their orders from the front porch. In spring 2020 they opened the bakery in their renovated first floor. Now the couple, both age 30, sell over 450 loaves per week while also supplying restaurants. Muñoz, wearing a mask, keeps the line moving one patron at a time inside, but many days it’s slow going because this is more than transactional. Muñoz knows the customers — neighbors as well as destination bread lovers coming in from all over the city and county — and most want to chat and feel the joy of a simple human exchange that’s so scarce these days.

Later the three of us sat in the bright warmth of the bakery. Photos of farms line the white walls. Trimmer had worked on a small Maryland farm that grew grains and practiced sustainable agriculture, part of an alliance of farmers endeavoring to take the soil back from decades of industrial farming, before he began baking in restaurants. “I saw that there was a need for bakers who could work with whole-grain flour,” he said. “These really weren’t in the wheelhouse of what most bakers are willing to experiment with.”

Many flours, even many whole grains, are often sifted free of the outer bran. “Why go through the effort of growing great grains just to throw out the most nutritious part?” Muñoz said. “The reason is it’s a harder product to work with. Bakers often prefer the white commodity stuff because it’s more consistent, and it’s a blank canvas for the flavorings they put in it.”

Motzi’s breads are flavored primarily from the flour itself, which they ferment, creating a range from puckerish sourdough to slightly sweeter fruit-inflected loaves. I took to the einkorn loaf, a nutty flavored bread made from a heritage wheat grown in Pennsylvania. Then there are the pastries: crisp, flaky croissants with a robustness from the grain; pain au chocolat with a vein of rich, dark chocolate.

Motzi now offers subscriptions where patrons buy credits for bread each week, and they can use their credits to buy a loaf for others, which the couple then donates. “Pay-it-forward loaves happened when we were starting to transition in the midst of the pandemic,” Muñoz said. “We recognize that there’s always food insecurity in Baltimore, but especially now, and we wanted to be responsive to that.” They average about 80 donated loaves a week.

As the pandemic persisted, they began offering a pay-what-you-can rate at the bakery. “When it comes to something like bread, it should be accessible to people,” she noted. Interestingly, Muñoz said customers sometimes feel like they can’t pay a lesser price. “People aren’t used to being given that kind of power.”

The couple named their business after hamotzi, the Hebrew blessing given over bread. In the Jewish tradition, this is more than prayerful thanks for a meal; it is a recognition of the work that went into growing the grain and the divine grace that “brings forth bread from the earth.” It is a benediction for a communal meal, for the land and labor that made it possible, and for the hope that all will share in the bounty.

One of the restaurants that serves Motzi bread is Larder, a 15-minute walk southwest from the bakery. Located in the Old Goucher neighborhood, it sits in a unique complex of historic buildings leased by Lane Harlan and partner Matthew Pierce, who also run a nearby taqueria called Clavel and a bar, W.C. Harlan. The complex, known as Socle, was conceived by Harlan and Pierce as a modern biergarten and wine bar called Fadensonnen. It has expanded into a dining collective that includes Larder and Sophomore Coffee, all fitted into a 19th-century residence and carriage house with an outdoor patio and wood-fired oven in between. Harlan also recently added a shop specializing in natural wines called Angels Ate Lemons. Larder, which opened in 2019, is the vision of chef Helena del Pesco, 43, with support from her spouse, Joseph del Pesco, 45, an art curator. The del Pescos moved to Baltimore in 2016 from the San Francisco Bay area, where Helena was an artist and cook who spent time in kitchens like Alice Waters’s famed Chez Panisse. One of her first endeavors in Baltimore was touring farms. “There is such an amazing small-farm collective in Maryland,” she said. Larder uses organic, locally sourced produce and meats to make meals for patrons as well as the other businesses at Socle.

I walked over one day and, mask on, spent an afternoon in the kitchen with Helena and her staff of three women. Cookbooks and jars of gleaming canned fruits and fermented vegetables lined wooden shelves. I picked fresh parsley leaves as the staff moved about the tiny kitchen, deftly maneuvering around one another as if choreographed.

Helena spent three years of her childhood on a commune in Tennessee, where she learned the tenets of community and activism through food. “There was an emphasis on what you ate as a part of the social change you could effect in the world,” she told me as she put together a Robot Coupe to shred radishes. It was while studying art, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, that she became interested in what is now called social practice, which encourages human interaction and discourse. She conceived participatory public art projects using food, including one where she cooked a 12 - course meal for 12 people based on their individual immigrant stories.

At Larder, Helena not only brings traditional methods like fermentation to her menu, she also uses the space as an infrastructure for community. Before the coronavirus pandemic, she and Joseph opened the kitchen to international chefs living in Baltimore for pop-ups and have hosted classes about lacto-fermentation and pickling.

Since opening, Larder has offered a sliding scale of prices for their food so that people can pay what they can afford. Amid various city orders to close restaurants during the pandemic, the couple started a CSR — a community-supported restaurant — last fall. Customers pay for a month of meals in advance and pick up the food each week along with fresh produce from local farms. The day I visited, Helena and her staff were busy preparing a duck cassoulet for the 80 members of the CSR (there’s a waiting list). Helena’s dishes are riffs on the traditional — comforting and complex at the same time. I saw that the secret is in the layering of flavors. The duck cassoulet, for instance, has a base of creamy coco bianco beans and is similar to a true French cassoulet, but hers is topped with her Quarantine Kraut, a surprising, piquant addition. As she experimented with a vegan dressing, I watched her loosely follow a recipe but add her own ingredients, including a salty, slightly spicy brine from pickled habanada peppers. Helena makes her own dry spice blends using local ingredients and sells them in her store. Every spice, every dish, has a story. The bay leaves that she added into a steaming pot, for instance, “came from a neighbor up the block who figured out how to create a microclimate in his yard and grow a bay laurel tree,” she said.

Helena has forged a relationship with all the farmers she partners with, and when I asked her whom I should visit next, she sent me to someone with an eye-opening take on nurturing the local landscape.

TOP: Helena del Pesco, 43, is the chef at Larder, which opened in 2019. BOTTOM LEFT: Desserts at Larder. BOTTOM RIGHT: Before the pandemic, Larder opened the kitchen to international chefs living in Baltimore for pop-ups and for classes.

Marvin Hayes is the program director of the Baltimore Compost Collective, an organization that collects food scraps from residents in several South Baltimore neighborhoods and composts those scraps at the Filbert Street Community Garden. I don’t know anybody who has “visit a composting site” on their travel wish list, but this place is wholly different — and entirely worth it. The community garden, located in South Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood, was founded in 2010 as a part of the city’s Adopt-a-Lot Program. It sits on a hill, surrounded by houses, with a view down to the water. I knew I’d arrived when I saw the monumental Curtis Bay Water Tower, a 1930s art deco marvel constructed from over 20 shades of brick. The garden is next door.

I was early, so I waited for Hayes outside the fenced-in garden, which stretches the width of a city block. Several miniature goats sunned themselves on the other side. Ed, a black-and-white goat who I would soon learn is an irascible attention seeker, ambled over. I laced my fingers through the chain link and rubbed his snout. Within minutes, a cinnamon-and-brown tabby stalked by, gave Ed a look of disdain and rubbed against the fence for my attention.

“I see you’ve met Pumpkin Spice.” Hayes is a tall 48-year-old, and his energy is infectious. When we entered the garden, the animals perked up and began to chatter. A Shetland sheep named Eedee immediately jogged over.

To call this acre of land a “garden” feels like a misnomer. It is a wonder what’s happening on this modest parcel, which is open to the public for tours, yoga, movie nights and classes in animal husbandry, composting, gardening and beekeeping — when there isn’t a pandemic. “Over there are the raised beds for residents,” Hayes pointed out. “The people in this area live in a food- insecure, food apartheid neighborhood. It takes most people more than 30 minutes to get to a market. There’s no fresh food, and the air is polluted.” Hayes is referring to the city’s trash incinerators that belch clouds of smoke not far from here.

He brought me to a chicken coop where the waterfowl — ducks, geese, turkeys and chickens — clucked in cheerful alarm at our approach. Most of the eggs produced each week are given to the neighborhood. The duck eggs are most popular. “We call them our snobby eggs because all of the bakers want them, they have so much yolk,” Hayes said.

There is a goat house, an apiary with nearly 70 hives, a hoop house filled with a winter harvest of kale and sweet lettuces. On top of a tool shed is a green roof made of sedum and solar panels to fuel garden equipment. Curtis Bay, like some other Baltimore neighborhoods, is an Internet desert — more than 40 percent of city residents don’t have reliable Internet access— so solar power fires a WiFi router.

All of the animals here are rescued, including many of the bees, which were collected by Filbert Street staff after alarmed residents called the city’s 311 system about swarms. Hayes’s namesake arrived in November, after an animal shelter found an emaciated duck abandoned and wandering South Baltimore. Now Marvin the Duck quacks excitedly amid the brood clamoring for lunch.

Occupying one corner is the compost lot. Hayes built two three-bin systems with the help of volunteers. Large wooden containers are filled with a mix of food scraps, worms, hay and leaves. In four months, with attention and care from Hayes and the teenagers he hires and trains in composting, the scraps turn into what he calls “black gold.” Hayes and his crew of youth workers divert 400 to 500 pounds of waste from the incinerator and the landfill every week. Hayes has a hope: that his modest enterprise spreads to community gardens across the city, that people learn to compost their food scraps, and that he can help move Baltimore to a zero-waste city. “I’m going to starve that incinerator with every scrap of food waste I compost,” he said.

He crumbled a bit of the damp humus into my palm. It smelled of clean, wet earth. It was deep black and smeared like a grease pencil across my skin as I rubbed it in my fingers.

After, we walked through a small orchard of pear, peach, apple, hazelnut and fig trees. Hayes’s favorite are the papaws, which are native to the Mid-Atlantic. “I call these the urban mango. They are delicious.” The honeycomb they harvest from the bees is scented with the pollen of the fruit and flowers they grow here, including native black-eyed Susan. You can taste the landscape in the honey. As I left, my fingers stained from black gold, I thought of how the French fiercely protect the notion of terroir, and in a city like Baltimore, we forget that we have it, too.

Marvin Hayes is the program director of the Baltimore Compost Collective, which collects food scraps from several South Baltimore neighborhoods and composts those scraps at the Filbert Street Community Garden

Beehives at the garden. RIGHT: Goats at the garden.

Across the water from Curtis Bay, as the crow flies, is the historic East Baltimore waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point. This is a place I believed I knew well. My family’s own history in America began here. My maternal grandfather grew up on Ann Street, just blocks from the water, and he spent his career working at the nearby American Can Co. My maternal grandmother’s family emigrated from Germany through the Port of Baltimore. I can trace my interest in cooking to my grandmother’s sauerbraten, slow-simmered beef and dumplings that I watched her make at every holiday meal.

Portions of Baltimore, particularly the land here along the Chesapeake Bay, belonged to the Piscataway and the Susquehannock tribes before colonization. From the 1940s to ’60s, East Baltimore also became home to a large population of Lumbee Indians from Robeson County, N.C. They migrated north to escape the Jim Crow South, where many were sharecropping on what was once their tribal homeland and unable to make a living. So many Lumbee people lived in a handful of blocks in East Baltimore at mid-century that it was dubbed “the reservation.” Food has always been an important part of the Lumbee story in Baltimore, but few Baltimoreans today know anything of this history. I met Ashley Minner one day on South Broadway, in the heart of what was once the Lumbee “reservation.” Only a few Lumbee people live in the original neighborhood now; most moved to the suburbs decades ago, like Minner’s Lumbee family. Minner is an artist and a public historian, and since 2003 she has been collecting oral histories and artifacts related to Lumbee history in Baltimore, while mapping their existence in East Baltimore. Her scholarly work for her PhD program at the University of Maryland at College Park, and her time working as a folklorist, has resulted in a new Lumbee archive named the Ashley Minner Collection, which will be housed within the Maryland folk-life archives at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Albin O. Kuhn Library.

Just a few blocks south, luxury hotels and oyster houses and bars with herb-infused cocktails line the cobblestone streets along the harbor. It’s a far cry from the working port my grandparents resided in, or the Lumbee people arrived to. But here, on the edge of the encroaching gentrification, there’s still evidence of a diverse city: a Brazilian market, an Ecuadoran restaurant, a Guatemalan grocery with a Spanish-speaking radio station running inside.

We stood in front of South Broadway Baptist Church, an 1840s Greek Revival building that the Lumbee bought in the 1970s. “I like to start my tour here because this is one of only two remaining buildings the Lumbee ever owned,” Minner told me. “This church has always had a Lumbee preacher from North Carolina in charge, and there are stories of people stopping in during services, and they think the guy’s speaking in a foreign language, but it’s just Lumbee.”

Fells Point has always been a place of diversity and food, courtesy of its history as an active port. The Lumbee were known for their cooking back in the day, Minner told me, and they brought their brand of barbecue — which is served chopped and in a vinegar-based sauce — to East Baltimore. A restaurant called Hartman’s BBQ Shop served the working-class neighborhood from 1959 to 1961. “They would feed construction workers, not just Indians but everybody, and it was on the honor system. People would come and get their lunches every day and come back on Friday to pay,” Minner said.

Barbecue helped to buy their church. “Lumbee are pervasively Southern Baptist and Methodist, and church was the first thing they needed to feel safe in this city,” Minner said. “Working-class Lumbee raised $90,000, and they raised it through plate-food sales.”

As Minner has been keeping the Lumbee-Baltimore story alive through historical research and oral histories, her cousin Rosie Bowen is keeping it alive through food. Bowen has owned Rose’s Bakery in the Northeast Market for several years, but she began collecting Lumbee recipes as a kid from her grandmother. Fried cornbread. Sliced collard green sandwiches. One dish, the Lumbee chicken and pastry, reminds me of a chicken version of my grandmother’s sauerbraten. Bowen returns to Robeson County each year to buy cornmeal and sweet potatoes and pecans for her recipes, and for the Lumbee diaspora hungry for a taste of home.

Ashley Minner, a Lumbee artist and public historian who is collecting histories and artifacts of the Lumbee who lived in Baltimore.

As Minner and I continued our walk north along Broadway, heading toward the former site of Hartman’s, she told me that she calls this her ghost tour. “Most of the places we’ll visit have either been razed by urban renewal or no longer exist as a Lumbee business.”

“What makes it important to you to map what’s gone?”

“Being in the skin I’m in, people look at me and assume I’m everything but what I am,” Minner told me. “When you don’t see yourself represented in the landscape, when you don’t see yourself represented in the media, it messes with you. You start to wonder: Am I really Indian? Am I really Lumbee? But when you see pictures of what was and understand for yourself by walking how much there was and how many of us there were — just to know you have that history here — is important.”

To walk across our overbuilt urban terrain, Tim Robinson wrote in his book “Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage,” is to remember that “every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics. ... To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings.” Traveling my city these past several months with people like Minner has reminded me of the myriad ways we are shaped by the landscape, both present and past.

Travel, at its best, shakes us from the stupor of everyday life and returns us home again more alert and aware. It reminds us of who we truly are. How extraordinary, then, to find that same potential at home, to transmute everyday life into an adventure. I opened myself up to my city with the curiosity of a tourist and the wonder of a traveler, and I realized that what I really want isn’t just foreign adventure, but to feel invigorated again by daily life. To feel connected to the place I live. It wasn’t all those years of leaving and returning that got me there. It was the staying.

OSI Announces Two New Board Members

OSI welcomes new Advisory Board members Catalina Rodriguez-Lima and Kenneth Jones Thursday, April 08, 2021

This week, the OSI-Baltimore Advisory Board officially added two new members, Catalina Rodriguez-Lima and Kenneth Jones.

Catalina Rodriguez Lima is the Founding Director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MIMA) in Baltimore City and a longstanding member of OSI’s Leadership Council. As Director of MIMA, Catalina is responsible for promoting community well-being, economic development, and the inclusion of immigrant and refugee communities in the City of Baltimore. Under her leadership, MIMA partnered with OSI on the Safe City Baltimore and, in 2020, OSI backed MIMA’s efforts to support for immigrant families impacted by COVID-19. A native of Ecuador, Catalina moved to the United States in 2000.

Kenneth “Ken” Jones is Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the MacArthur Foundation, where he is responsible for all aspects of the finance, accounting, tax, audit, information technology, administrative services and facilities functions. In addition, Ken implements and evaluates the Foundation’s financial objectives and performance to support MacArthur’s priorities and programs. Prior to joining the MacArthur Foundation, Ken was the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

“Ken’s institutional governance expertise and Catalina’s expertise working with immigrant communities and other marginalized communities are going to augment the Board’s deep bench of talent,” says OSI Advisory Board Chair Jamar Brown. “I have no doubt that they will have a lot to contribute to the strategic planning for OSI-Baltimore and lead us into the next decade of our work.”

OSI Announces Partnership with Rockefeller Foundation on Equitable Vaccine Initiative

Baltimore Justice Report

OSI-Baltimore partners with The Rockefeller Foundation on Campaign to Increase Covid- 19 Vaccination Rates among Communities of Color

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Baltimore among Five U.S. Cities Selected by Rockefeller to Help Meet its National Equity Vaccination Goal of 70 Million Vaccinations to People of Color by July

BALTIMORE | April 13, 2021 – The Rockefeller Foundation has selected Baltimore as one of five pilot cities to launch a historic $20 million Equity-First Vaccination Initiative to improve the vaccination rate among communities of color, which have been disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

With Rockefeller’s support, Open Society Institute-Baltimore (OSI-Baltimore) will launch the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative to provide medically sound, culturally competent information about vaccine safety and improve distribution and delivery mechanisms to reach disconnected Baltimoreans through pop-up vaccination sites and mobile clinics across the city.

In addition to on-the-ground support, the Initiative will support resource hubs to assist in addressing access to health care, housing, and other critical health-sustaining needs and advocate for systemic change that will address community infrastructure and social service needs to reduce health disparities.

“The Rockefeller Foundation has been a key ally to Baltimore and OSI from the early days of Covid-19 when it helped to create Baltimore Health Corps, an initiative to recruit, train, and employ more than 300 residents who were jobless due the pandemic as contact tracers,” said Danielle Torain, Director of Open Society Institute-Baltimore. “We are proud to continue this partnership through the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative, which will ensure that communities have equitable access to the vaccines, information, and other resources.”

OSI-Baltimore will partner with a number of local, community-based organizations and government agencies to ensure that disproportionately impacted communities, including Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and low-wage essential workers, are adequately served.

“Because of existing structural inequalities—including health care access, wealth gaps and systematic racism—people of color have been much more likely to both contract Covid-19 and die from this virus,” said Otis Rolley, Senior Vice President for the U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation and a former member of OSI-Baltimore’s Advisory Board. “The Rockefeller Foundation is launching this initiative because a vaccination strategy that does not seek to directly combat inequities stands to further entrench them.”

Representing less than one-third of the 63 million people who are now fully vaccinated in the United States, communities of color are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 and three times as likely to be hospitalized as white Americans. To close this gap, The Rockefeller Foundation will initially collaborate with five organizations to deploy equity-first, hyper-local public health interventions in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Md.; Chicago, Ill.; Houston, Texas; Newark, N.J.; Oakland, Calif. During the second phase of the Initiative, the Foundation will collaborate with several national organizations to take lessons learned from the five cities and ensure that at least 70 million people of color are vaccinated by July 2021.

Equity-First Models to Increase Access and Confidence

The Equity-First Vaccination Initiative will demonstrate and scale hyper-local, community-led programs to improve vaccine access and accurate information across five cities that represent 5 million of the nation’s 95 million adults of color. Learnings from the initiative in Baltimore and the other four U.S. cities will help inform strategies across the country to increase access to Covid-19 vaccinations in communities of color, contributing to a collective, national north star goal of ensuring at least 70 million people of color will be fully vaccinated by July 2021.

In this first phase of the initiative, the Foundation will provide grant funding to five anchor organizations: Open Society Institute-Baltimore, The Chicago Community Trust, Houston in Action, United Way of Greater Newark, and Roots Community Health Center in Oakland. These organizations will provide resources and additional support to over 100 community-based organizations (CBOs) that will then lead hyper-local community mobilization efforts to better address questions and concerns on when, why, and where to get the vaccine, increase vaccine access, and rollout additional community vaccination sites. In addition, the CBOs will also be connected with public health communications, dis/misinformation, and health marketing experts who will provide accurate, evidence-based information to improve their ability each to address questions and concerns about the Covid-19 vaccines.

An initial poll issued by HIT Strategies, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, of people of color in Baltimore found that while the majority of respondents (74 percent) want to get vaccinated when eligible, a majority (58 percent) do not know how to get vaccinated. In addition, the poll confirmed systemic health issues facing people of color in Baltimore today: one in five respondents have trouble getting care when needed and felt disrespected when getting care. Fourteen percent of Baltimoreans said they see a doctor less than once a year.

“We want everyone to be confident in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines—but that will only happen if everyone has access to them,” said Greg Johnson, Managing Director for the Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. “People need to see the benefits to their friends, families and loved ones, and be able to get the vaccine from a provider and a place they trust.” Best practices and impact-to-date from these equity-first models will be synthesized and shared nationally through cross-sector networks, advocacy efforts, convenings, and publications to ensure that the most effective solutions are actively adopted to effectively remove racial vaccination disparities:

• Knowledge generation: The Foundation will surface barriers and promising solutions observed both nationwide and in our demonstration pilots.

• Networks: The Foundation will regularly share data and learning with national networks, including the Pandemic Solutions Group (PSG) and the State and Territory Alliance on Testing, to crowd in support from other public, private, and civil society partners to scale models that work.

• Advocacy: The Foundation will work alongside federal, state, and local governments to further expand awareness about the Initiative’s initial findings and impact as well as advocate for critical policies, targeted resources, and the use of new strategies and tools in order to reach 70 million people of color by July 2021.

MD passes Healing Maryland’s Trauma Act. OSI supports Healing City Baltimore.

Healing Maryland’s Trauma Act passed

By: WMAR Apr 28, 2021

BALTIMORE — Maryland is taking a different approach to trauma.

Lawmakers announced the passage of the Healing Maryland's Trauma Act Wednesday.

The legislation takes Baltimore's Elijah Cummings Healing City Act and the Healing City movement to the state level. It establishes the Commission on Trauma-Informed Care and calls for a statewide healing framework.

The legislation was introduced by Senator Jill Carter and Delegate Robbyn Lewis

“Throughout my career I have pushed Maryland to invest in systems of care, instead of systems of incarceration,” said Senator Carter. “This legislation marks an important moment in our history, as we embrace healing.”

Every year, the Commission on Trauma-Informed Care will submit its findings to the Governor and the General Assembly. The Maryland Department of Health will be tasked with developing a process and framework for implementing an Adverse Childhood Experiences Aware Program.

Baltimore Business Journal features OSI Director Danielle Torain and the B’More Invested collaboration.

B'More Invested, a collaboration between Baltimore foundations, announces first grant recipients

Danielle Torain is director of the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. The organization provided anchor funding for B'More Invested, a new collaboration of foundations in Baltimore.

• By Holden Wilen – Reporter, Baltimore Business Journal

May 14, 2021, 3:07pm EDT A new collaboration between some of Baltimore's most well-known foundations aims to flip the traditional grantmaking model on its head.

Organizations typically receive grants from funders who determine how they want the money to be used. With B'More Invested, community members get the primary say in determining what work gets funded.

B'More Invested is a $2.3 million pooled fund anchored by $1 million from the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and $300,000 from Baltimore's Promise, a nonprofit that aims to address issues impacting Baltimore youths. Other foundations that provided funding included major names like the Baltimore Community Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the France-Merrick Foundation and the T. Rowe Price Foundation, among others. B'More Invested aims to address a history of disinvestment in Baltimore's majority- Black neighborhoods resulting from systemic racism. City neighborhoods that are less than 50% Black receive nearly four times the investment of neighborhoods that are more than 85% Black, according to an Urban Institute analysis.

Ten nonprofits led by people of color will receive $150,000 grants from B'More Invested in a pilot round announced Friday. Danielle Torain, director of OSI-Baltimore, said an additional $300,000 will be made available to grantees for "capacity-building" efforts at the organizations, such as building up their back offices.

The grants went to organizations working on addressing issues related to community safety, including crisis response, stabilization and healing and restoration.

The grant recipients are:

• A Revolutionary Summer

• Black Male Yoga Initiative

• The Black Yield Institute

• Bloom Collective

• Bmore Empowered

• Baltimore Youth Kinetic Energy

• Fight Blight Bmore

• MOMCares

• Organizing Black

• Out for Justice Inc.

A grant advisory team ultimately decided which organizations received funding. The team included 23 community members from neighborhoods and organizations across Baltimore, and 11 representatives from foundations that invested in the initiative. OSI chose not to have a representative on the team because it made the largest investment.

"The whole ethos of B'More Invested is to say the people who are most impacted by these investments should play a really central role to guide how we think about investing in communities," Torain said. "They should actually sit at tables with us to help us make these decisions because sometimes they bring an entirely different perspective and a deeper appreciation for what's happening in these communities."

The grant advisory team considered close to 50 organizations before settling on the final 10 recipients. They brainstormed a list of candidates instead of using the traditional request-for-proposals process, which Torain said "unintentionally creates a climate of competition among groups that are already strapped for resources." Shawna Murray-Browne, a community healer at Kindred Wellness and a member of the grant advisory team, said the selection process "was certainly not business as usual."

"It was truly collaborative, with each community advisor coming from different walks of life, all holding true to their commitment to the people of Baltimore," Murray-Browne said in a statement. "For the first time in this philanthropic space, I felt heard."

Torain said she hopes B'More Invested leads to more support for local leaders of color, and positions the nonprofits funded in the first cohort for larger public investments in the future. She also sees the creation of B'More Invested as a landmark moment for Baltimore's philanthropic community, with so many large foundations coming together for a singular cause.

"The other thrust of B'More Invested is about pulling together a more collaborative way of working as foundations and trying to maximize the resources we have together, which is a different way of working," Torain said. "Sometimes we work in silos as foundations and we're trying to break out of that."

B'More Invested will disburse the grants and work with recipients over the next 18 months. The group will next highlight the work of the nonprofits at local and national levels. With momentum, Torain said she would like to see more investment come in to support future rounds of grant funding.

OSI-supported B’More Invested announces first round of grants

Baltimore Justice Report B’more Invested announces first round of grants to 10 organizations led by people of color to support restorative approaches to community safety and healing

Friday, May 14, 2021

New grantmaking strategy relies on community members and funders to make decisions on grants

BALTIMORE, MD – Launching an innovative approach to community-driven grantmaking, the B’more Invested initiative is awarding $1.5 million in grants to 10 nonprofit organizations that are led by people of color and involved with promising efforts to promote community safety and healing and create stronger communities. An additional $300,000 will be made available to grantees in the form of capacity-building opportunities to support their work over the grant period.

The grantees are offering a wide array of programming – from yoga and biking to promoting healthy birthing and fighting blight – serving adults and young people.

B’more Invested is a new initiative and demonstration pilot anchored by OSI-Baltimore and Baltimore’s Promise that focuses on core values of racial equity, justice, community transformation, and collaboration. Several philanthropic institutions have invested in the initiative, which is designed to support promising community programs and leaders working at the grassroots level.

Unlike the traditional grantmaking approach in which foundation staffers decide on grants, B’more Invested grant decisions were made by a Grant Advisory Team made up of 23 members of the community and 11 representatives of the institutions that have invested in the initiative. B’more Invested allocated an additional $175,000 to support the participation of the 23 community leaders in this process through honoraria and small grants. The facilitation of the initiative’s initial grantmaking pilot was provided by the W. Haywood Burns Institute and Art in Praxis.

“B’more Invested represents an emergent way of making grants in Baltimore – with people directly representing impacted communities and populations making the decisions about how philanthropic funds are invested,” said Danielle Torain, Director of Open Society Institute- Baltimore. “For too long, Black- and brown-led organizations have been overlooked or grossly underinvested in by philanthropic institutions, and B’more Invested is working to change that by intentionally supporting organizations led by talented people of color.”

A key goal of the initiative is to provide new, flexible funding to promising organizations that have lacked adequate resources to expand their programming and reach more people. A secondary goal is to learn from and uplift local models that reimagine approaches to community safety. Grants will average $150,000 and will be disbursed over an 18-month period.

“Baltimore has some incredibly talented community leaders and organizations that have exciting strategies for advancing community safety,” said Baltimore’s Promise CEO Julia Baez. “Our Grant Advisory Team has identified 10 that have promising approaches but have not always had the resources they need to maximize their impact.”

“This was certainly not business as usual,” said Shawna Murray-Browne, a member of the Grant Advisory Team and community healer at Kindred Wellness, a Baltimore consultancy. “It was truly collaborative, with each community advisor coming from different walks of life, all holding true to their commitment to the people of Baltimore. For the first time in this philanthropic space, I felt heard. We began with tough, authentic conversations and ended with an out-of-the-box strategy to celebrate and fortify Black-led initiatives. We are communicating something powerful about what it can mean to reimagine community care, safety, and healing.”

B’more Invested has pooled investments from the following organizations:

Baltimore Community Foundation, Baltimore’s Promise, Blaustein Philanthropic Group, Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Elbow Fund, France-Merrick Foundation, Goldseker Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund, Lerner Family Foundation, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, T. Rowe Price Foundation, and the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation

“Being a part of B’more Invested offered an opportunity for us to participate in an innovative approach to grantmaking,” said Kate Essex, Program Officer at the Goldseker Foundation. “By partnering with and learning alongside community leaders and philanthropic peers, we were able to make collaborative investments in local leaders of color who are working to make Baltimore more safe, just, and equitable.”

Along with the grants, B’more Invested will devote additional funding for evaluation, as well as grantee capacity-support to help grantee organizations build up their internal infrastructure and promote long-term sustainability.

The grants are focused in three areas related to community safety:

Shifting Crisis Response: Community-based alternative systems and interventions that respond to personal, group, or community crisis in an equitable and restorative manner. Stabilization: Community-based alternative systems and interventions that facilitate the stabilization and holistic growth and development of people.

Healing and Restoration: Community-based alternative systems and interventions that ameliorate the intergenerational trauma and harm experienced by communities at the hands of unjust and inequitable systems.

“I’m excited about the partnership between Out for Justice and B’more Invested, given our shared values addressing racial equity and economic inclusion through a framework of community-based solutions,” says Nicole Hanson-Mundell, Executive Director of Out for Justice, a B’more Invested grantee. “This mutually beneficial relationship will begin to transform the way we tackle the most pressing issues facing our communities by equipping those directly affected by these problems to lead the way in reimagining the approach to real reform and having the power to control the development and decision-making processes that govern these programs.”

“There is so much to be thankful for with the recent B’more Invested grant, and one of the most promising factors is the engagement with both grantors and the team-building aspect of the grantee cohort,” said Changa Bell, Founder of the Black Male Yoga Initiative, another grantee. “We get to come together equally as a valued cohort. I have been a part of a fellowship like this before and we all became family. The bond is truly unmatched.”

B’more Invested Grantees 2021

A Revolutionary Summer Founded: 2015 Founder: Andria Nacina Cole

A Revolutionary Summer (ARS) is a critical reading and writing program dedicated to shifting harmful and traumatic narratives about Black women and girls through literature, art, self- inquiry and self-empowerment. The organization presents Black girls with authentic representations of themselves and simultaneously encourages them to look beyond those representations and to see the power and limitations of story. Working with Black girls ages 15 and up, ARS specifically supports girls connected to punitive systems, foster care, the justice system, and Black girls who spend time in predominantly white institutions, helping participants realize their individual power and potential. Focused around relationship building, restorative practices and trauma-informed care, ARS empowers Black girls through literacy, while building the political, economic, spiritual and social power of the girls and their communities.

Black Male Yoga Initiative Founded: 2015 Founder and Chief Yoga Officer Changa Bell

The Black Male Yoga Initiative (BMYI) envisions a future where race and gender are no longer social determinants of health, affecting physical, mental and emotional health, and where individuals can take paths of self-determination, self-optimization and self-empowerment. BYMI supports healthy self-development through the LifeForce Development (LFD) Process, which integrates skills, principles and practices of yoga, mindfulness, meditation and life coaching as means of personal improvement. Founder Changa Bell uses LFD to enhance corporate, academic, personal and professional culture, in groups that range from just over a dozen people to more than 400. The work drives health equity and establishes self-motivated action to support health and mental well-being, with a focus on people of color and members of the African diaspora. BYMI respects and meets community-defined needs, tailoring services and programs to the culture and language of each group.

The Black Yield Institute Founded: 2015 Servant-Director Eric Jackson

The Black Yield Institute (BYI) is a Pan-African power building and social movement institution in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill community. Its two-fold mission includes mitigating the immediate impacts of food apartheid in poor Black and brown communities and building movement towards Black Land and Food Sovereignty. The organization serves as a think tank and collective action network to address these issues and aims to be an incubator for ideas and projects. Founded in 2015, BYI is working to expand and develop enterprises that build power, provide food and ownership opportunities, and create a model of Black Land and Food Sovereignty at the hyper-local, community level. Its multi-tiered approach includes investments in infrastructure for food production, retail and distribution in Cherry Hill and South Baltimore.

Bloom Collective Founded: 2018 Diverse network of founders

The Bloom Collective is a liberation-focused network of health and wellness practitioners grounded in birth and reproductive justice, womanism, human rights, holistic care and healing justice. The Bloom Collective provides services including: preconception counseling, fertility care, breastfeeding/chest feeding/body feeding support, childbirth education, herbalism, psychotherapy, parenting support, postpartum care, coaching, consultations and trainings. In addition to health and wellness care needs, the Bloom Collective works to galvanize mothers, birthing persons and communities to build political, social, economic and spiritual power.

Bmore Empowered Founded: 2017 Co-Directors Kieta Iriarte-Amin and Nazaahah Amin

Bmore Empowered is dedicated to empowering women and girls of color through mindfulness and entrepreneurship. Created after the co-founders identified a lack of impactful programming for Black and Brown girls across Baltimore City, the organization started with camps, training and yoga therapy – and expanded as mothers of participants as for similar programming. In 2019, Bmore Empowered opened an office in Harlem Park that offers co-working space and a yoga studio for women, and broadened supports for nonprofits led by Black and Brown women. Empowerment is a key tenet of the organization’s approach. It builds social power by bringing women together to support each other within a sisterhood, spiritual power by focusing on mindfulness and yoga, and economic and political power by establishing a model to equip women of color with the knowledge, skills, tools to effectively grow and sustain their communities, serving nonprofit organizations and small business enterprises.

BYKE Founded: 2014 Executive Director Jasper Barnes The Baltimore Youth Kinetic Energy (BYKE) Collective started after its founder noticed young people of color trying to access a local bicycle workshop, and consistently refused entry — at times leading to violent interactions. By 2016, BYKE launched a youth-centered drop-in bicycle workshop in Greenmount West with a focus on providing mentorship, restorative practices, and workforce development for youth from disinvested communities. BYKE also runs an out-of- school time program called Golden Fleet and a summer program called Rise Up and Ride Out. The program responds to a local bike culture dominated by white, cisgender men, the astronomical costs of bike repairs, and the lack of access to most bike shops. BYKE, which serves a population that is 98% Black/African American, celebrates youth being active, learning skills, and building social and emotional intelligence through a passion for riding.

Fight Blight Bmore Founded: 2016 Founder and COO Nneka N’namdi

Fight Blight Baltimore’s (FBB’s) mission is to remediate blight through community projects and programs that are envisioned, directed and owned by the community. An economic, environmental and social justice organization, FBB believes that blight – vacant, abandoned, dilapidated, underutilized and misutilized properties – arises from impacts of systemic racism, including disinvestment and depopulation, thus significantly decreasing taxable properties in historically Black neighborhoods across the city, while destroying community continuity, damaging wealth creation and generational transfer, and eroding property rights and responsibilities. FBB’s work includes: informing individuals about blight and its impact; co- creating and implementing a mobile application, with community, to identify, report, track and analyze local blight data; providing a space (the Hack Hub) for community members to co- create and build skills that can ameliorate community blight and build individual and community power; and supporting the development of real property that is visioned, led, implemented and owned by the community’s existing residents.

MOMCares Founded: 2016 Director Ana Temple Rodney

MOMCares provides birth and postpartum doula care to black women who are characterized as high risk or have had a birth resulting in Neonatal Intensive Care involvement. Focused on Black mothers in Baltimore City, MOMCares aims to address disparities due to implicit bias in the medical and care systems that contribute to a large percentage of preventable deaths of Black women and babies. The organization provides birth and postpartum doula care including one- to-one care, birth planning, baby care essentials, delivery, advocacy and mindfulness and wellness support to healing mothers. MOMCares takes a mom-centered approach in our care for families in Baltimore City. MOMCares has also begun to provide implicit bias training to medical institutions and community organizations and has also begun to train doulas in the community with the help of the Doula Trainings International Curriculum.

Organizing Black Founded: 2015 Co-Founders Michaela Brown, Ralikh Hayes and Tré Murphy Organizing Black is a grassroots, member-led organization with the ultimate goal of Black liberation. The organization builds local power through transformational Black direct action organizing, political education, and participatory governance practices. OB was co-founded [in 2015] by three young Black community organizers who believe that the path to Black liberation and a just, fair, equitable democracy can only exist through the hard work of redefining the systems that give way to oppression and racism. Having identified the police as one of the most threatening barriers and impactful targets for the well-being of Black people in Baltimore, OB has focused on limiting police power, authority and budgets in order to redirect investment into Black communities. Involved in various local and national spaces, OB also works to strengthen the social justice infrastructure in Baltimore and to create a network and build power for Black people locally and nationally.

Out for Justice Founded: 2006 Executive Director Nicole Hanson

Out for Justice, Inc. (OFJ) was started by a group of formerly incarcerated individuals who recognized they didn’t have meaningful opportunities to successfully reintegrate due to ever- present challenges related to obtaining jobs, housing, and education – systemic barriers that increase the likelihood for recidivism, especially for women and Black community members. OFJ places individuals affected by the criminal justice system at the forefront of policy-reform efforts that directly impact them, their families and their communities, accomplishing its mission through engagement, education and empowerment. Through an intake process, OFJ identifies the needs of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals, then provides educational workshops tailored to their needs, training on the legislative process to understand the root causes of barriers and what can be done to address them, and a trusted community network. Membership support includes a housing referral program, drug treatment, legal services and more.

OSI-convened People’s Commission to Decriminalize Maryland publishes interim report People’s Commission to Decriminalize Maryland reports on progress and future work

Thursday, May 20, 2021

This week, the People’s Commission to Decriminalize Maryland held a community convening to discuss its interim report, review the successes and setbacks during the 2021 legislative session, and discuss priorities going forward. You can watch the convening here.

OSI-Baltimore convened the People’s Commission to reduce the disparate impact of the justice system on people who have been historically targeted and marginalized by criminal and juvenile laws based on their race, gender, disability, or socio-economic status. For the interim report, the commission examined Maryland’s code and court systems to identify specific ways that laws disproportionately harm historically marginalized groups.

Each of the commission’s five workgroups – drug policy, homelessness, poverty, sex work, and youth – presented their approach the work and identified specific changes to the criminal code necessary to achieve their goals. Among the successes lifted up from the 2021 legislative session were the decriminalization of drug paraphernalia and overturning the governor’s veto of the “Unit Rule,” which will now allow more charges to be expunged from individuals’ records.