On Friday, the Baltimore Sun published a news story about the first round of grants from OSI-Baltimore’s Baltimore Justice Fund. It included an interview with OSI Fellow Lawrence Brown, whose organization, You’re the Quarterback, received a $25,000 grant. “We’re going to take those resources and use them right away,” said Brown, whose program, the story notes, has served 125 men in Upton. “This is a moment of great opportunity. It takes people realizing that now is the time to really make the sort of changes that are needed so we can have a different outcome in the future.” The story comes about a week after a Chronicle of Philanthropy story about the grants.
On the same day the Sun story ran, the paper also published an op-ed from OSI-Baltimore director of strategic communications Evan Serpick, “Baltimore’s ‘uprising,'” about why we should describe the movement that began after the death of Freddie Gray as an uprising. “To describe the broader series of events — including weeks of protests, marches and the mobilization of thousands of Baltimoreans into a movement to change the status quo (orders of magnitude more than the number involved in the riots) — uprising fits best,” he writes.