Yesterday, OSI-Baltimore Director Danielle Torain joined Mayor Jack Young, Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, and other government and civic leaders to announce the launch of Baltimore Health Corps, a $12 million public-private partnership to hire hundreds of unemployed Baltimore residents to be contact tracers and care coordinators for residents of Baltimore neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19.
Unemployed Baltimore City residents can apply now for the jobs, which Jason Perkins-Cohen of the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development says will pay between $35,000 and $39,000 a year and contribute $11 million to the local economy. “The best response to an economic crisis is a J-O-B,” he said at a socially-distanced press conference inside the War Memorial Building Thursday morning.
OSI-Baltimore will provide funding and support to implement the program.
“Baltimore Health Corps is exactly the kind of innovative, impactful public-private partnership that OSI is looking to support in response to COVID-19,” Torain said at the press conference. “The initiative is particularly crucial because it looks at the mid- and long-term impacts of COVID by promoting job creation and job access for populations of workers disproportionately marginalized from the job market.”
Read more about the program in the Baltimore Sun story and in the Mayor’s office’s press release.
