Check Out Our Podcast and YouthWorks Oral Histories!

Remember Jocelyn's post about the summer YouthWorks program here at GHCC? Well, we finally have the finished audio files ready for your ears! We're featuring them on the front page of our website, but wait! There's more! They're also available as a podcast from the iTunes store. 


This is such a great project, we've decided to keep it going by continuing to collect audio stories to supplement this blog. We'll be sure to let you know when a new audio file has been uploaded, but you can also subscribe to the podcast via the link above to receive new episodes automatically.

Welcome New VISTAs!

Today was a hectic day to be at GHCC: we welcomed 10 new VISTA members into our midst! The morning kicked off with bagels and coffee from Eddie's Market Charles Village, plenty of great conversation, and the first social gathering for GHCC staff since our cookout in July. As you can see, we had a great time!



Staff and new VISTA members networking over coffee and bagels.



They've arrived!



From left: outgoing VISTA member Ari Witkin, Central Baltimore Partnership Community Builder Garland Thomas, Neighborhood Programs Manager Jermaine Johnson, and incoming VISTA member Kait Orr



Changing of the guard: outgoing Special Literacy Projects VISTA Cyndel Taylor (left) chats with Literacy Transitions VISTA Erin George.

Too Good to Be Thru: A New Greater Homewood Gem!

GHCC believes every neighborhood should have a walkable commercial district, so we like to promote businesses that are helping to create that vibrant urban feel in Greater Homewood. Pam Corkran recently opened a consignment shop called Too Good to Be Thru in southern Charles Village near Barclay and Old Goucher. Here she shares her life experience in Baltimore and her journey to entrepreneurship.

I came to Baltimore in 1968, during what I call the Martin Luther King era. I lived in the 2100 Block of N. Calvert Street and attended the Margaret Brent Elementary School. What an era it was. We had a quiet neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, and I remember loving to play on the Lovely Lane Church steps.

But on the day Martin Luther King died, the world—or at least our street—lost its stability. The law of the land disappeared into chaos. Our street became a war zone filled with Army National Guard. At 10 years old, I had just come from West Virginia, and I was peeping out our 10 foot windows at tanks, trucks, and military men. I saw people throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks, National Guards beating people with batons, crowds scattering everywhere looting and destroying businesses. That was the beginning of my cultural transition in life—what an impact.  But here I am, right back where I started when I came to Baltimore.

I’ve worked all my life, mostly two jobs at a time until I started to do foster care 18 years ago with The ARC of Baltimore. I am now the parent of two adopted children and two foster children, all with special needs. Once I realized the demand of working two jobs and caring for my special needs children, I resigned from one of my jobs and scaled back my work hours.  Two years later, one of my foster children died from AIDS. I was devastated and just couldn’t seem to go back to my job, so I stayed home to care for my children. I worked on and off, taking time to care for the children when they needed me.

Now several years have passed and here I am again, starting a new venture in my life. Too Good to Be Thru Consignment Boutique was started with five girlfriends (myself included). We loved the idea of opening a business in the Charles Village area, where there are just so many new things happening: beauty salons, After 7 Apparel, a shop for tuxedos and women’s evening and church wear, and Studio 2113, a designer who makes excellent clothes. There may even be a café coming opening soon. These are exciting times!

As a mother of four I thought doing clothing would be great. We encountered several roadblocks along the way, including making sure our shop complied with Baltimore City’s building codes and zoning laws.  But we prevailed with ongoing persistence and determination, and 18 months later I am here to prove it! Our shop is right in the middle of John Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, MICA, the Board of Education, Department of Social Services, and numerous non-profit organizations and small businesses. All within walking or bike riding distance—what a perfect location!

Reflecting on Summer YouthWorks

Submitted by Jocelyn Durkay

This was my second summer facilitating our YouthWorks program here at GHCC. YouthWorks, a program from the Mayor's Office on Employment Development, gives summer jobs to youth ages 14–24. 

Placement at a worksite, only contingent on submitting your application correctly and early enough, gives valuable job skills to teens with little or no experience. With youth employment at its lowest point in over half a century, this program gives 30 hour per week jobs to young people who likely would otherwise be unemployed. Unfortunately, for financial reasons this year YouthWorks was only able to hire 5,100 of the 9,000 applicants. I wish more of Baltimore's youth could have had this opportunity.

While I strongly believe in the fundamentals of the program, it comes with its unique challenges. In previous years, discipline, tardiness, and work attitudes resulted in headaches and firings. However, this crop of workers had fantastic work ethic. In fact, I think this has been one of the best years for YouthWorks at GHCC. After some trying incidents last year, I must admit that I had underestimated our Youth Workers. They proved to be bright, hard-working, prompt, and a lot of fun to be around.

This summer's program also had a lot more extra substance than previous years: workshops on college and careers, plus an oral history story collection project that provided me with the best experiences of the summer.

Youth Workers interviewing Dr. Jacqueline Waters-Scofield, Principal at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School in Charles Village.

For this project, our youth split into three groups to conduct interviews of Greater Homewood residents. The final product consisted of three audio files between 20 and 30 minutes long, but some groups recorded conversations up to an hour long before editing! While our intern, Zack, and I were present for the interviews, the youth were responsible for everything: choosing the questions to ask, following up to learn more, and final editing.

The interviews were powerful and memorable for me: hearing teenagers speak with older adults about their lives during segregation and changes to their neighborhoods and communities over the decades. I was most definitely amazed at the depth and quality of their questions and how fearlessly they jumped into what could easily be seen as an intimidating task. Even though my voice or name doesn't appear on the finished products, they are one of my proudest achievements from this year.

Edit 8/18/2010: GHCC has been a YouthWorks host work site for the past six years. This year, we hosted seven youth, all of whom participated in the oral history project.

Sustainability Resources for Home and Work

As promised on Monday, we have a few resources to share with you from our recent participation it the Johns Hopkins University Climate Showcase project.

Our friends at JHU provided us with reference sheets to help you make your home and office more energy efficient.

• Green Buyers Guide: this quick reference sheet gives you some ideas for energy-saving products you can buy for your home or office. Already doing all that or want to try something else? Check out this starter sheet on composting your yard and food waste.
• Sustainability Education and Engagement Resources: if you're in a position to reach out to others about sustainable life and work practices, this is the guide for you. It contains resources for educating youth, adults, and homeowners.

Climate Showcase an Eye-Opening Experience

Submitted by Tyson Smith

I think anyone who knows me would say that I’m not particularly environmentally aware.  I mean, I recycle, but that’s easy.  I turn off the air conditioner when I leave my office because that makes sense to me.  But I just don’t see the big environmental picture as a priority.  I like to make jokes about “loving the earth” as a reason to do or not to do something.  I’m that kind of guy.

Naturally, then, I found it kind of a challenge to act as the point person for GHCC’s participation in the Johns Hopkins University Climate Showcase Program, a summer initiative all about building environmental sustainability in Baltimore non-profits.  Skepticism aside, this represented nearly a week of my time in meeting with two JHU interns, touring them around our building, facilitating staff-brainstorming sessions, etc.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing about the experience if it had been a waste of time, so I’ll cut to the chase and say that GHCC’s participation in the JHU Climate Showcase was a wonderful and valuable experience.

The JHU interns who facilitated the process, Sean Murphy and Olugbenga Adeyinka, were excellent resources.  They offered practical advice, both in terms of the physical factors of environmental sustainability—how much water flows through your toilet, quality of light fixtures, etc.—and  what an agency like GHCC can do to help promote environmental sustainability in the community.

As a participant in the program, GHCC was provided with a number of resources, specifically tailored to our perspective as a community-based non-profit, about environmental sustainability.  These resources ranged from quick tips about how to live a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle to specific documents about buying green office supplies, home improvement supplies, etc.  We can now share this knowledge with communities throughout Greater Homewood—in fact, we'll even be offering some tips on this blog later in the week.

Maybe the best outcome, though, was bringing all of GHCC’s programs together to have this kind of environmentally-based conversation.  Through the Climate Showcase, we gathered staff to brainstorm ways for GHCC to integrate green practices, philosophies and goals into our organizational culture.  The interns’ assessment of GHCC, I am happy to say, was that we were in pretty good shape.

And I guess the real victory here is that I learned that being environmentally conscious isn’t that arduous.  It’s relatively easy, and pretty important, so I’m going to try to increase my personal level of participation.  Thanks to Benga, Sean and to the Johns Hopkins University for this excellent opportunity!