Archive

OSI-Baltimore Community Fellows Brittany Young (2018) and Brion Gill (2015) named among Baltimore Sun’s 25 Women to Watch By Baltimore Sun Staff Meet the Baltimore area’s leading voices in business, activism, research and more. Look for the 25 Women to Watch in a special magazine supplement in some editions of The Sun on Sunday, Oct. [...]

2020 OSI Community Fellow Bree Jones featured in Baltimore Sun By Hallie Miller When Bree Jones was a financial analyst in New York City, her visits home to nearby New Rochelle, New York, distressed her. Neighborhoods were changing fast, displacing many who had lived there for decades, Jones said. Luxury apartment buildings were popping up [...]

By Stephanie García Stepping in to translate between landlords and tenants, Kendra Summers saw that her Latino neighbors needed an advocate. The teacher’s aide at Brooklyn’s Maree Garnett Farring Elementary School created Casa Amable — which translates to “Kind Home” — a program that teaches residents new to the U.S. about tenant rights and the [...]

2017 OSI Community Fellow Eric Jackson featured By Isabella Gomes On a cold March Saturday afternoon last year, three community activists showed up one by one to the empty school in Cherry Hill. They’d been called by an elder of their historically Black neighborhood in South Baltimore. For several weeks, Michael Middleton had been tracking [...]

By Emily Opilo After a failed start under a previous administration, Baltimore is again kicking off a $6 million program to distribute debit cards to city residents affected economically by COVID-19. The initiative, dubbed the COVID Emergency Assistance Program, is funded by the city and administered by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. It is expected to [...]

By BALTIMORE SUN EDITORIAL BOARD The COVID-19 pandemic gives more reason for why the state should finally approve legislation creating overdose prevention sites, where people can use drugs in a safe setting staffed with medical professionals. Advocates of such sites, which already exist in 12 countries around the world, have tried for around half a [...]

By Stephanie García Ashley Minner included only three stops at first on the tour she created of the Lumbee Indian Community of East Baltimore: South Broadway Baptist Church, the Baltimore American Indian Center, and the Vera Shank Daycare and Native American Senior Citizens building. Then in October 2016, as she gave the tour to a group of [...]

By Andre M. Davis I was doubly discouraged by the data reported by Professors Doug Colbert and Colin Starger reflecting the unnecessary and unjust over-incarceration of non-violent pre-trial detainees in Baltimore (“Bail injustice in the time of COVID-19,” Sept. 7). Not long ago, as an advisory board member of Open Society Institute-Baltimore, I applauded OSI’s participation [...]

By Jean Marbella and Hallie Miller You probably want to know if you’ve come in contact with someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus. But questions like who else would know, and what they might do with that information, have made some wary of a new cellphone notification tool developed by Apple and Google [...]

By Iman Freeman, Nicole Hanson, and Caryn York  Maryland justice officials should take a fresh look and a new approach to addressing racial bias in our pretrial bail system, which continues to result in disparities in who is let out of jail and given monetary conditions of release that they can’t afford despite reform efforts [...]