Only a matter of time until a community organizer steps in and starts asking for government grants.
Via Baltimore Sun
When April Hopps’ son, Jordan, graduated from high school, he left Baltimore. He had grown up, she said, believing the city “didn’t have anything for him.”
Hopps is proud of her now 21-year-old son’s accomplishments — getting into college in Miami, completing an internship with a major sports network — but she wants to make her hometown a better place for youngsters to grow up.
As the city, state and other groups spend millions of dollars to step up summer outreach to children following Freddie Gray’s death and April’s civil unrest, Hopps and hundreds of other volunteers are working with community and faith leaders to create opportunities for them and keep them safe from violence.
The Empowerment Temple is converting a building in Bolton Hill — where Hopps has been volunteering — to a children’s center named for Gray; it will offer free meals and camps. Volunteers are flocking by the hundreds to Big Brothers Big Sisters, offering to mentor youths in Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray was arrested.
Others are collecting money, food and school supplies for some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. A fire dispatcher in the city donated $30,000, and raised even more from businesses, to revitalize the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center in West Baltimore. And the 300 Men March, a community group that takes to city streets to de-escalate violence, is recruiting for its youth leadership program, which pays adolescents to take training in peer-to-peer mediation and other violence prevention methods.[…]
Ten children have been killed in the city this year, up from seven during the same period last year. The number of children wounded in shootings has jumped to more than 20 this year from three during the comparable period last year, according to City Councilman Brandon M. Scott, the vice chair of the public safety committee.
Hopps and Gail Evans were among the volunteers who have spent recent days painting bright colors on the walls of the Freddie Gray Children’s Empowerment Center, in the former Labor Union headquarters building on Eutaw Place.
“Playing outside in Baltimore City is no longer safe,” Evans said. “This is a place to feel safe and to have adult supervision.”
The massive building has more than 40 rooms, including nine classrooms, a computer lab, a game room, seven offices and a main hall and an auditorium that can each fit 300 people.