Northwest Baltimore Corporation
Jean M. Yarborough, President
Diane Frederick, Interim Executive Director
Julie Reeder, Community Organizer (I interviewed her)
3702 W. Rogers Ave.
Baltimore, Md. 21215
(410) 542-6610
(410) 542-7153 fax

The logo of NWBC features a large umbrella, a suitable symbol for a 30-year-old group that provides resources for the more than 70 community organizations that form its membership in Baltimore's Park Heights neighborhood.

Founded in 1968 in a changing community that was gradually losing its middle-class and upper-middle-class Jewish residents and becoming more predominantly black and poor, NWBC began as a way to foster communication and cooperation rather than rivalry and mistrust among neighbors. Today it provides both community organizing and direct services aimed at stabilizing and revitalizing the neighborhood.

Some 66,000 people live in Park Heights, and despite its reputation for crime and drug dealing and vacant lots and houses along its main commercial corridors, the neighborhood is better defined by its many pockets of sturdy and stable two-story townhouses and the hard-working families who live there. While the area has lost much of its commercial base (the last large supermarket pulled out, almost literally sneaking away by night, recently), but Sinai Hospital and the Pimlico racetrack, home of the Preakness Stakes, remain as local landmarks.

The race track, in fact, is a primary engine of the local economy, thanks to a city law that taxes the track corporation on the basis of the number of racing days in its annual calendar, and returns part of that revenue to the community in the form of funding for targeted programs and grants; a substantial part of NWBC's $400,000 budget, which supports a staff of about 15, comes from the track through city government in this form. About one-third of that money in turn passes through to small neighborhood groups and non-profits for which NWBC acts as fiscal agent.

Among NWBC's direct services are included an active and popular literacy program, which owes its particular success to the teacher's individualized instruction, involving lessons tailored specifically to each student's particular strengths. The organization hopes to expand this program to more students, and to include GED and job-readiness training, as space and resources permit.

The organization also runs a day-care center -- Northwest Child Development Center -- for the 2 to 4-year-old children of working parents. This center is located in the BelPark Tower Senior Citizens Building and takes full advantage of the voluntarism of the complex's older residents to help out with the child care.

Finally, its innovative "Board and Clean Team" hires neighborhood men -- two teams of four -- to take care of cleaning up and properly boarding the neighborhood's many vacant houses, a task at which city government was failing. The project not only abates neighborhood eyesores but provides useful, paying jobs for residents.

Another direct service, commercial revitalization, operates basically as a form of community organizing, with the organizing partners being small-business owners and operators.

NWBC has also started and spun off any number of significant community programs including a major community-development corporation, a community health clinic, a counseling provider for young people, a summer youth employment program and a large, bustling community farmers market.

Meanwhile, community organizing continues, much of it currently involving the city's Race Track Impact Foundation, which is now dealing with a proposal to add casino gambling at Pimlico -- coupled with a threat by the management to close the facility if casino gambling isn't permitted.

This kind of neighborhood "umbrella" is commonplace in Baltimore, rare in most other cities. It's an idea that deserves to spread!

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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