Archive

Today, Mayor Brandon Scott, Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, and Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MIMA) Director Catalina Rodriguez Lima announced the COVID-19: Prevención, Control y Respaldo (COVID-19: Prevention, Control, and Support) initiative “to mitigate the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in the Latino community.” Part of the city’s response has been Emergency Relief for Immigrant Families (ERIF), […]

Yesterday, 2018 OSI Community Fellow Shelley Halstead, founder of Black Women Build-Baltimore, returned to the Kelly Clarkson Show to show off a house that she had just finished renovating with Bryanna, the new homeowner, who appeared with her.  In September, Halstead appeared on the show to talk about Black Women Build, which trains Black women […]

Brittany Young, 2018 OSI Community Fellow and founder of B-360, and Bree Jones, a 2020 OSI Community Fellow and founder of Parity, have both been named to the Maryland Daily Record’s list of Leading Women. Flip through the digital version of the issue here.

Justice advocate Monica Cooper talked about her life and advocacy and the ongoing challenges of making lasting change in Baltimore’s justice system in a wide-ranging interview with Adam Bednar for the Maryland Daily Record. Cooper is executive director of the Maryland Justice Project, an OSI-Baltimore grantee focused on decriminalization, decarceration, and advocating for the rights […]

The People’s Commission to Decriminalize Maryland, a coalition of organizations that OSI convened to identify areas of the criminal code in which behaviors that pose no threat to public safety are criminalized in a way that targets people based on their race, gender, disability or socio-economic status, has published an outline of policy recommendations in […]

Last week, OSI Director Danielle Torain spoke to the 2020 cohort of the Baltimore Young Leaders Professional Development Program. The program, run by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Community Wealth Partners, was inspired by OSI’s 2018 report, Young, Gifted, and Underfunded, which documented local funders’ low rate of giving to youth-led movements and recommended […]

OSI-Baltimore is among several funders supporting a new collaborative, community-based approach to reducing violence in Baltimore City, called the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS).  Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the Baltimore Police Department, and the Office of the State’s Attorney co-released a statement announcing the strategy last week, suggesting […]

Today, Baltimore City Councilman Kristerfer Burnett, chair of the Council’s Health Committee hosted an informational City Council hearing on Overdose Prevention Sites (OPS) for the stated purpose of “inviting representatives from the Health Department, the Baltimore Police Department, the Fire Department, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and the Law Department to provide information about […]

On Thursday, Tara Huffman, director of OSI’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Program, participated in a panel discussion on “Building an Anti-Racist Economy” as part of the Maryland Center for Economic Policy’s (MCEP) third annual policy summit. “None of what we’re doing is making any of us safer and it’s most certainly not making those Black […]

Last week, the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law’s Center for Dispute Resolution hosted a webinar on “Building a Restorative School District,” sharing the results of OSI’s recent report, co-released with the Center, Johns Hopkins’ School of Education, and Baltimore City Schools, which detailed the initial impact of integrating restorative practices into […]