Baltimore City

You are the Angel on every corner

the last choir

life’s deliverer and death’s powdery hand

You are the Man in the Mirror

the jittery birds calling on the fence

You are the breeze that blows in every season

catching up what’s left...

You can’t get around it.

You can’t talk around it. You can’t write around it. And, you certainly can’t walk around it. In fact, on any given day, on any given street in Baltimore, you may run right smack into it.

I’ve been thinking recently about how it’s going to feel turning 20 this year, especially now and in Baltimore – a city standing at a crossroad with some big decisions to make after an unsettling spring. And, I’m also wondering what it’s going to be like on the West Side after having really come of age in the heart of East Baltimore.

Following the death of Freddie Gray, the need for more and more meaningful work as an antidote to injustice in Baltimore has become a rallying cry. Caroline Center reflects on one aspect of the issue in The Breakroom.

What a loss that some of Baltimore’s best employers continue to fly under the radar for “Top Workplace” recognition, especially when they consistently get high marks from their employees in all of the areas that a recent Baltimore Sun survey determined make people want to come to work each day. So, what keeps these great employers from making even a blip on the Sun’s “Top Workplace” radar? It may be that like Caroline Center they have fewer than the fifty employees required to be considered even a “small” company.

Within four days, this single hashtag had been tweeted an astounding 1.2 million times.

The Julie Gold song “From a Distance” has long been a favorite of mine. And, as two strikingly different events converge this year – the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and a rare meet-up in our own Milky Way galaxy of two unique, yet equally impressive entities, a spectacular gas cloud and an immense black hole with the mass of four million suns, Gold’s lyrics give us pause for thought...

Many of the women who attend Caroline Center enter this world with the deck squarely stacked against them. Many, but not all. Take, for example, Caroline Center graduate, Quy’an (pronounced Kwan-yun) or “Q” as she is called by just about everybody. Q grew up on Long Island, New York in a relatively stable family environment. Though her parents divorced when Q was 12 years old, to this day they remain “best friends” and – more importantly – strong and positive influences in Q’s life. She describes her mother as a “hard worker” and recalls (with a smile) how her father constantly nagged her about schoolwork and admonished her to “keep her head in the books.” Their good example and advice paid off.

“My potential will carry me to a great place.”
Because so many of the women who attend Caroline Center come from similar backgrounds and have similar life experiences, the tendency to lump them all together under one label might be considered understandable. Understandable perhaps…but wrong.

We all want the same thing. To live – and raise our children – in a safe and nurturing environment. But let’s face it. It’s a perilous world. Danger lurks everywhere and sadly, you don’t have to venture beyond the menacing streets of our own troubled city to encounter it. In the last two months of this year alone (and this month is not over), there were more than 60 shootings and 40 homicides in Baltimore City. A public safety concern, by any definition.