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IHB member Ana Rodney has been a tireless advocate for mothers of color in Baltimore. A doula, author, yoga master, Reiki instructor and mother, Ana founded the Rising Mama brand and the postpartum doula program MOMCares. She is also community organizer for B’More for Healthy Babies.

Recently, Ana became one of Open Society Institute Baltimore’s ten 2019 Community Fellows! Each fellow receives $60,000 over 18 months for their initiatives. We can’t wait to see what Ana does with this opportunity to grow and scale MOMCares.

Ana nearly lost her life giving birth to her son Aiden. Having been a doula for nine years before her pregnancy, she knew that she was not being given the treatment she needed. 

“There were certain things I expected from the medical community that I didn’t get. Choices that I knew I had that no one let me know I had,” she says. 

Around the time of Aiden’s birth, Ana’s older sister also passed away after giving birth due to a minor complication with her gallbladder that developed during her pregnancy. 

African American women are about three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications. All too often, these deaths are preventable. Factors like better health care, communication, support from doctors, and access to stable housing and transportation can all make the difference between life and death. 

Shortly after her pregnancy, Ana began building MOMCares  — a postpartum doula program that offers self-care workshops to mothers of color, with a focus on black mothers. 

“This is a deeply personal issue for me that keeps me moving forward,” Ana says. “This is something that I needed as part of my life’s work and part of my life’s purpose, which is to #correctthecrisis.” 

Before Ana became a member of Impact Hub in 2017, MOMCares was a one-woman operation. Her headquarters were at home, and she did all of her work on her laptop using Wi-Fi from her phone. Funding came primarily from the little personal savings she had. Now she has a small but growing team: 10 active volunteers and a volunteer coordinator, a research associate, a program manager, a childcare consultant, and two interns. The team has become self-sufficient to the point where Ana can work full-time at B’More for Healthy Babies as its community organizer. She says that taking on another job compelled her to share the load of MOMCares. 

“I had to recognize that there are people who want to do the work with me that want to support the work that are just as capable and invested in the work as I am,” she says. “Becoming part of a team has allowed me to step fully into my Executive Director role.”

Through Impact Hub, Ana made many of her most transformative connections. She’s hosted healing circles for mothers all over the city, some of whom she continues to support to this day. While hosting a Skillshare on black women and the superwoman complex in February 2018, she met someone who invited her to join the Maryland Breastfeeding Coalition, connecting her with other medical professionals and birth workers across the state. Ana was also chosen for Impact Hub’s inaugural Courageous cohort, which she says widened her circle of creative and innovative entrepreneurs. 

“I don’t know whether those types of interactions would have been as easily accessible had I not been connected to Impact Hub,” she says. “Impact Hub connects me to colleagues, it connects me to other thought partners and potential program partners…to a portion of the public that may not think or feel like they had access before. Those are the types of relationships that MOMCares thrives off of.”

At first, the construction business that Sam co-founded in Greenmount West was small — “not really a business,” he says. Up to a little over a year ago, Sam and his business partner Shea Frederick were working 80 hours a week, with the occasional help of a few neighbors. 

Small as Four Twelve was, Sam and Shea had a clear vision: to do real estate development and construction that would serve the Baltimore community. They hired locals to help them restore old and damaged buildings in the city. They also built from scratch. One of their earliest projects was to build an entire house with three young men in the neighborhood. At the beginning, the three men had no construction skills; by the end, the house was complete and they’d earned a thousand hours of living wage labor. 

Since joining IHB in March 2018, Four Twelve’s growth has been exponential. In the past year and a half, the company acquired a team of 30-40 employees who work on a daily basis, meaning that Sam and Shea only have to work for half as long as they used to. 

The ability to form connections at IHB was key. “Just being around different members here, being able to pick their brains about different resources…has been big,” Sam says. Executive Director, Michelle Geiss directly referred the company to as many as 10 new clients. They were also able to acquire insurance, workers comp, and licenses for their largely Hispanic/Latino labor force through the Latino Economic Development Center–fellow members of Impact Hub.

Shortly after joining the Impact Hub community, Sam and Shea also led a Lunch + Learn, through which they met someone from the Baltimore City Office of Rehabilitation Services. Through that connection, they’ve done 10 projects with the Office’s Division of Homeownership and Preservation and have partnered with other nonprofits. Being at Impact Hub also means physical proximity to NHS Baltimore, Jubilee Baltimore, and Central Baltimore Partnership (CBP), which means access to even more partnership opportunities. 

As Four Twelve grows, it’s been able to take on more ambitious projects, like repairing roofs for low-income seniors at discounted rates and donating a free roof to a resident in Greenmount West. Its next big step is to relocate to the industrial property where it runs construction activities. Four Twelve is applying for a grant from the Baltimore Regional Neighborhood Initiative (BRNI). CBP has been administering BRNI’s grant programming. 

“If we weren’t here in this space and able to interact with [CBP] everyday, it would be a lot less likely that we would eligible or able to work through that grant process,” Sam says.

Since its founding in 2013, local literary nonprofit DewMore has been a critical resource for young poets in Baltimore. It organizes one of Maryland’s largest youth poetry festivals, holds workshops at schools, and helps young poets practice for national poetry slams.

DewMore’s parent organization is Poetry for the People, founded by IHB member Olu Butterfly Woods. Olu reflects on the indispensable role that poetry and art has in civic engagement.

Many think of writing as an individualistic experience. But for Olu, it’s very much communal. Joining Baltimore’s underground hip hop scene in her early adult years, she constantly ran into and collaborated with other writers.

Inspired by that community, she co-founded Poetry for the People Baltimore, an organization that intersects poetry and civic engagement.

“There was no specific agenda so much as…how can we get our art to be more useful to people?” she says.

For Olu, poetry and community work have always been inseparable. Ten years ago she co-founded the Baltimore Citywide Youth Poetry Team using personal funds and meeting with community members in living rooms.

“I consider the community my real boss,” she says. “That’s who’s in charge.” 

Poetry for the People is the parent organization of DewMore, the local literary nonprofit that has also taken the Youth Poetry Team under its wing. Much of DewMore’s service is also oriented towards young people. Every year it organizes one of Maryland’s largest youth poetry festivals in April for National Poetry Month. The nonprofit also hosts workshops throughout the city and holds a monthly open mic at Impact Hub run by teenage poets, who draw the fliers and come up with the themes. 

“It’s a form of development for the young people that are involved…a platform for their voices and other people’s voices,” Olu says. 

This past July, the Youth Poetry Team went to Las Vegas to perform at international youth poetry slam, Brave New Voices.  In the weeks leading up the slam they did what Olu calls “bootcamp” – gathering in a small office at IHB and practicing their poetry. Towards the end of the bootcamp they were practicing eight hours every day. Olu tells the team not to think of the slam as a competition. Still, the team won the top prize at the slam last year for the second time in three years.

Impact Hub has been an important communal space for Olu and her team since 2018. “Having a central location where we can have a staff meeting is invaluable,” she says. Their office has also become a drop-off and pick-up point for community members. She credits Impact Hub with giving her a space to collaborate and build new relationships — some of which happen informally. 

“There’s other people who are doing parallel and intersecting work…who knows what those relationships may result in in the future?” Olu says. “It’s encouraging to see other people doing work that affirms the work that you do.” 

Going forward, Olu wants to be more robust in engaging the community. “If you’re going to be sustainable you’re looking to diversify how you sustain yourselves,” she says. “Not just with grants, but to do more events or opportunities for the community to support and services…I’d like to be a point of continuity for people. When they think of Baltimore, they know that DewMore is there.”

Established in 1782, Lexington Market is a Baltimore landmark and one of the oldest existing markets in the world. From 2020 to 2021, the historic market will be undergoing major renovations. IHB member Pickett Slater-Harrington, who founded the social change design firm Joltage, sheds light on how the redevelopment project will incorporate the visions of both community members and institutions.

Throughout his career, Pickett has worked closely with a mix of nonprofits, governmental and for-profit entities. And when it comes to community development, he’s noticed a disheartening pattern. 

“The thing that I kept seeing no matter what…was this disconnect between community and institutions,” Pickett says. “They never developed mutually beneficial relationships and partnerships.”

That’s why he founded Joltage in 2010, a social change design firm that bridges that disconnect between communities — particularly communities of color — and institutions. Originally founded in Cincinnati, OH, Joltage relaunched in Baltimore in 2018. 

“A lot of my work is making sure resources flow back and forth between those two groups,” he says. “A lot of the times communities try to go at it alone and a lot of the times institutions try to go at it alone. And when you go at it alone you’re never as successful as when you go together.” 

Currently, one of Joltage’s biggest undertakings is leading the community engagement efforts connected to the redevelopment of Lexington Market. Baltimore officials announced that they intended to spend $40 million renovating the historic market last year. Overseeing its redesign is Seawall Development, which also built R-House, a popular food hall in Remington. Seawall contracted Joltage to design and lead their community engagement process. 

Some Baltimore residents have raised concerns about how inclusive the renovated market would be to those in the surrounding community, particularly black and low-income residents. As part of that process, he’s formed working groups. Made up of community members and professionals, these groups are organized around specific topics, like safety and environment. “The only way to get a thriving successful market is if the community around the market is thriving and successful,” Pickett says. 

Pickett credits Impact Hub for helping him better understand Baltimore. Pickett, who is from South Carolina, lived in Cincinnati for 10 years before moving to Maryland. He settled down in Baltimore in 2018. Though he arrived just a year ago, it’s a city that he now calls home. 

“The thing that has helped us to grow and scale is connecting to places like Impact Hub,” he says. “It’s deeply connected to both communities and institutions…it’s one of those natural places in communities where different people collide and feel comfortable being in that space.” 

Leading Skillshares is one way that Pickett has been able to strengthen his network in Baltimore. He also moderated the third and final event in Impact Hub’s SOCAP365 series this past July, focused on co-creating with communities. 

“Impact Hub has a culture that’s open and accessible, equitable, and it holds a place that’s unique in Baltimore. And we need more places like this,” Pickett says. “My greatest hope is that Lexington Market will be a place like that… a place where people feel like this is where I belong, and this is where I can connect and be.”

Sarah: “The following is the first of my interviews and our MEMBER SPOTLIGHTS. I spoke to Rebecca Yenawine who is the Executive Director of the Teacher’s Democracy Project (TDP), an education advocacy group in Baltimore City. TDP looks to bring together teachers and parents to fight for a more just urban education system in Baltimore.”

Rebecca has always been passionate about uplifting young voices. Years ago she founded the social justice organization New Lens, where she helped youth make videos about social justice issues. Now, as the Executive Director of TDP, she helps organize BCPS teachers and parents so that they can have more power in shaping school policy and practice.

Most recently, TDP was a part of incubating a union caucus. Now that the caucus won teacher union leadership, “they are able to lead all sorts of things that they normally wouldn’t have taken up because there wasn’t an active teacher body,” she says.

Making more supportive spaces for students also means retaining teachers — particularly Black teachers.

“Schools are very top-down spaces. They’re historically pretty oppressive spaces,” Rebecca says. “That history of oppression is important to counter.”

One initiative of which Rebecca is especially proud is the Black Teachers Recruitment and Retention Working Group, a yearlong working group that analyzed the decline of black teachers in the district.

“The key finding is that teachers leave because they don’t feel supported,” Rebecca says. “There’s a particular way that Black teachers are hit hard by the lack of supports because of the way that the District has structured some of the entryways into teaching.”

Rebecca has been a member of Impact Hub since 2017. As a neutral space, Impact Hub has been critical for teachers to be able to gather and organize, since teachers cannot organize inside their school buildings. Located in Central Baltimore and a block away from the BCPS District Office — with whom TDP works with regularly — IHB is accessible for teachers and parents across the city.

“It’s made us more visible,” Rebecca says of Impact Hub.

TDP has had very flexible funding. This is something that — after years of working in the nonprofit sector — Rebecca is grateful for.

“We’ve not had to make compromises in the ways that I’ve had to do in other jobs. And I feel like that’s essential, being able to follow where the work leads us, and follow what the funder thinks the work should be,” Rebecca says. “That’s a great gift.”

 

2019 marked the fourth consecutive year in which Impact Hub Baltimore has partnered with JHU’s Community Impact Internship Program (CIIP). The Community Impact Internships Program is a competitive, paid summer internship, that pairs JHU undergraduate students with nonprofit organizations and government agencies to work on community-identified projects in Baltimore. This program strives to give each of its students that same inspiration and opportunities for growth as they connect them with an organization. This year, we were lucky enough to have Sarah Y. Kim join our team for the summer. Below you’ll find Sarah’s reflections on her time in the space:

 Impact Hub encapsulates everything I love about Baltimore. No day is the same — it’s a diverse, constantly shifting community of people with so many different talents and ideas who do share one thing: a real love and commitment to the community and the people in this city. The physical space is a shrine to everything local. Paintings by local artists cover the walls, bags of Thread Coffee line the kitchen shelves. The furniture — tables, rugs, chairs — are by local makers, and the long island in the communal kitchen is made from demolished rowhomes. 

There’s a welcome informality to Impact Hub. Strangers bump into one another — by the kitchen, at Skillshares, in one of the open spaces — and form pivotal connections. Members are open, warm, eager to know about you and how you are doing. Young poets huddle in an office room, reciting, stomping and clapping in unison; kids eat their lunch from a pot and ride dollies across the open spaces; people lie on the floor of a conference room, meditating. At the beginning of each team meeting we talk about how we’re feeling, sitting around a scented candle. Sometimes we close our eyes, turn the lights off and we do a little breather. 

For me, the last couple of weeks at Impact Hub have been the busiest and the most fulfilling. I’ve had the privilege of meeting face-to-face with members from so many different walks of life and who’ve given so much to the community. In these last weeks I’ve interviewed a poet, a roofing contractor, a birth worker, a teachers organizer, a dirt biker. The list goes on. I’ve re-experienced the sense of fulfillment I’ve gotten out of doing student journalism in Baltimore: reaching out to people from completely different walks of life, learning more about them and the city and the complex relationships between communities and institutions, feeling grateful when people entrust me with their stories. 

These eight weeks have really flown by, and in that time my love for Baltimore has only grown. I’m thankful to have had a front seat in watching Impact Hub’s growth, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Impact Hub and its members. 

“Grow in and with community”

Today, I sat down with Alanah Nichole to reflect on the role of Lunch + Learns and Skill Shares at Impact Hub. Every week, there are at least five opportunities which draw community members from all parts of Baltimore City. They are free to attend and open to the public. In fact, the Skill Share platform alone resulted in a 30 percent increase in event RSVPs from September 2018 to January 2019. Considering this, there is no doubt that these events represent two important types of programming that contribute to the space’s daily rhythms and community culture:

IB: Hi Alanah! How would you describe your role at Impact Hub?

AN: I would say my role as the Marketing and Space Activation Manager is to make sure current and prospective members in the community feel welcome in our space. I aim to make IHB a place where they can come [to Impact Hub] as entrepreneurs during the early stages, to grow in and with us. Above all, I want to make sure that community members know that there are platforms that exist which they can be a part of — Even if they just have a great idea.

IB: Could you tell me a little bit about Lunch + Learns and Skill Shares?

AN: Sure! Lunch + Learns provide a platform for entrepreneurs to practice sharing their ideas, products, and services in a supportive context. Meanwhile, Skill Shares allows speakers to share their skills with a range of Impact Hub Baltimore members and  community to gain access and insight into social innovation, education, design, civics, arts, culture and more in a co-created, locally rooted daytime platform. We partner with a range of organizations to pair bottom-up innovation with organizational expertise to shape tangible solutions to on the ground issues affecting our communities around Baltimore and beyond.

IB: How would you say these two events are similar and/or different?

AN: Well, for me, Lunch + Learns can happen everywhere, while Skill Shares are unique to Impact Hub. They provide similar platforms, but Skill Shares are arguably more accessible. We make Skill Shares free and open to the public. Changing the language on how we viewed Lunch + Learns helped us make Skill Shares more informal, yet fun and equally as informative, if not more.

IB: What’s your favorite thing about spearheading Skill Shares and Lunch + Learns?

AN: I love seeing new folks come to the space. It’s also really cool to see people who have been part of the space since 2015 feel a rededication and newfound love for the space, and wanting to engage. In general, I just really like talking to each individual to comb and tease out what they’re going to talk about in their Skill Share, and how to make it relevant to social entrepreneurs in our audience.

In Baltimore, the neighborhood where you are born determines the condition of your housing, schools, work and built environment. It even predicts how long you will live.

In partnership with the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) and MICA Center for Social Design, Impact Hub Baltimore developed a data exhibit showing maps of growing and shrinking neighborhoods in Baltimore and the three key drivers of neighborhood growth — vacant properties, housing diversity, and travel time to work. During 2017, the exhibit was displayed during events and daily coworking. Charged with a goal to make neighborhood data relatable and actionable, the exhibit ultimately became a part of events with Federal Reserve and the Baltimore Office of Sustainability.

You can explore the full online version of the Visualizing a Better Baltimore Exhibit here.

Innovating Ecosystems

To advance new solutions to local challenges, we convene people around specific issues in ways that focus the collective insights and energy of a group. Connecting around a shared vision or cause helps people to build awareness of their own role in the social innovation ecosystem and take collective action to fill gaps.

Co-Creating Economic Opportunity

IHB invited leaders of 11 economic opportunity initiatives to share their work with 80+ event participants. Through a facilitated small group discussions, leaders engaged in collaborative brainstorming to make progress on current challenges.

>> Learn more about Co-Creating Economic Opportunity here!

Investing in Urban Innovators

In partnership with the Aspen Institute, Invested Impact, and Art in Praxis, IHB co-hosted a high-caliber, curated discussion on investing in nonprofits, small businesses, and high-growth companies led by entrepreneurs of color. Speakers from New Orleans, Cincinnati, Oakland, Detroit, and other cities shared successful models and thought leadership in a full-day event with 100+ people.

>> Learn more about Investing in Urban Innovators here!

Communities for Change

IHB organized an 8-week collective learning process around housing stability and neighborhood development. Weekly sessions with a cohort 25+ diverse participants explored how to advance more community-owned and led neighborhood development initiatives. IHB coordinated with Impact Hub Boulder, Budapest, Harare, Seattle, and Shanghai, as well as the MIT Presencing Institute to adapt the Theory U framework to a specific local issue in need of transformative change.

>> Learn more about Communities for Change here!

At Impact Hub Baltimore, we want our community to succeed. There are many ways to get involved and grow in our space, whether it’s through membership, offices, or a wide variety of exciting events.

Connecting Charm City is a series that highlights how we create a thriving community through a combination of membership, programming, and events hosted at Impact Hub that activate our space and sustain our operations, so that we can continue to grow. You’ve already learned a little about Our Membership — Each volume of Connecting Charm City will introduce how Impact Hub programming brings life and fresh ideas to the space, as well as include articles for those who’d like to take a closer look at past happenings. Programming typically fall into one of three categories:

Each of these programming categories generate a different type of value for participants and creates the conditions for social innovation to emerge. For the Impact Hub Baltimore community, programming extends the value of the space beyond coworking to actively engage in advancing social impact in the city.

We are excited for you to learn more!