How do you describe Baltimore? Media narratives and national politicians highlight the city\u2019s ills: poverty, violence, and racism. But that narrative is contested by many who call the city home. They cite Baltimore\u2019s rich culture, the thriving art and culinary scenes, and a city\u2019s spirit that is both comforting and quirky.<\/p>\n
At this pivotal time in history, the reckoning of those two narratives is transforming the approach of local leaders who are helping to shape public policy. By amplifying the deep sense of community and connection shared within Baltimore\u2019s distinct neighborhoods, a cohort of Goucher alumnae\/i is working across city government\u2014in housing, neighborhoods, education, and legislation\u2014to provide the necessary resources and empower the city\u2019s marginalized and vulnerable residents in more just and equitable ways.<\/p>\n
Many Goucher alumnae\/i have stayed and worked in local government or nonprofits in the city and the surrounding Baltimore communities. In the Baltimore County community, John Olszewski Jr. \u201904<\/strong><\/span> currently serves as the county executive, with Romaine Williams \u201978<\/strong><\/span> serving in Olszewski\u2019s executive team as chief of employee and labor relations.<\/p>\n In the 2020 election, Baltimore City residents voted in their youngest mayor, Brandon Scott, along with the city\u2019s first Hispanic city councilmember, Odette Ramos \u201995<\/strong><\/span>, and reelected Zeke Cohen \u201908<\/strong><\/span> to the city council. After years of political scandals that have rocked city leadership, there is renewed hope that positive change is coming.<\/p>\n Goucher College has its roots in Baltimore City. The college was founded there in 1885, and it remained there for more than 50 years. Even today, the neighbor\u00adhood where the original college campus was located is referred to as \u201cOld Goucher.\u201d Beyond the geographic points, the ties between Goucher and Baltimore City continue to this day through community-based learning programs, internships, and institutional partnerships with other colleges and universities in the city.<\/p>\n After growing up in Albuquerque, NM, Odette Ramos \u201995 moved to Baltimore to attend Goucher. At Goucher, she was student body president for three years and one of the first students to create their own major. For her, it was social justice.<\/p>\n Being active in student government helped lay the foundation for her future roles in public service. She says many of the skills needed for public service can\u2019t be taught. Goucher\u2019s student government experience helped her learn more about how to get involved and enact change as well as the role compromise could play in moving messaging and causes forward.<\/p>\n Zeke Cohen \u201908 came to Goucher from Northampton, MA. At Goucher, Cohen also served as student body president. He worked to bring speakers from the city to campus and had a formative experience interning for Sheila Dixon during her Baltimore City mayoral race. His student experience was broader than just politics, and Cohen developed a writers\u2019 workshop for boys living in a West Baltimore foster home. That experience changed his life, and after graduating from Goucher, he enlisted in Teach for America, where he insisted he be placed at a school in Baltimore.<\/p>\n \u201cGoucher played a profound role in my journey as a public servant in Baltimore,\u201d says Cohen. \u201cThe city adopted me. I fell in love with it, and there was nowhere else I wanted to live after college.\u201d<\/p>\n Alice Kennedy \u201997<\/strong><\/span>, acting housing commissioner for the Baltimore City Department of Housing & Community Development, also credits her Goucher education and experience as key to her interest in community engagement, community service, and public policy. \u201cGoucher prepared me for being an active member of the community\u2014how to listen, engage, and take action.\u201d<\/p>\n When Kennedy spoke to her graduating class during her Goucher Commencement ceremony, she emphasized, \u201cGoucher prepared all of us to be stewards of the world we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n Franca Muller Paz \u201910<\/strong><\/span> also had a transforma\u00adtional experience while at Goucher. As a student, she received a social justice grant to teach at an after-school program at an elementary and middle school in the Sandtown-Winchester area of Baltimore. She recognized how powerful her students\u2019 voices were, and she wanted to support them by becoming a teacher. As a first-generation college student who emigrated from Peru as a child, she knew how important education was.<\/p>\n After graduating from Goucher, she joined Teach for America and became committed to organizing. She teaches at Baltimore City College high school, and there, she supported the creation of Students Organizing a Multicultural Open Society (SOMOS), a student-led movement that fights against systemic injustice. She is an elected Baltimore Teachers Union building represen\u00adtative and appointed to the Baltimore Movement of Rank and File Educators. In 2020, she ran for Baltimore City Council as a Green Party candidate.<\/p>\n Gabriel (Gabe) Stuart-Sikowitz \u201913<\/strong><\/span> began working in public policy and political campaigns during his time at Goucher and continued in the field when he graduated. After working in Baltimore City Councilwoman Shannon Sneed\u2019s office, he realized the impact his work could make in the city. \u201cI really enjoyed working on the council and working to pass legislation that helped building service workers and residency requirements, and helped bring a procedure system to the municipal regulations process.\u201d<\/p>\n When he joined Councilwoman Ramos\u2019 office as legislative director, \u201cI saw a chance to continue working to build a better city,\u201d he says, \u201cand help a lot of different people.\u201d<\/p>\n A third-generation Goucher College graduate, Scott Davis \u201910<\/strong><\/span> currently serves as director in the Mayor\u2019s Office of Neighborhoods, where he works for Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott. After graduating, Davis, who studied Spanish and peace studies, began working as a Baltimore County Public School Spanish teacher. At many of the schools he taught, he found himself spending a lot of time helping translate for the school\u2019s Hispanic populations and assisting non-native English speakers in navigating systems.<\/p>\n That work helped him recognize the more signifi\u00adcant impact he could have on the community, and he decided to get involved in community government.<\/p>\n Cohen also made the transition from teaching to public service. In 2012, Goucher Quarterly<\/em> profiled Cohen in a feature on emerging leaders. At the time, Cohen was a young alumnus who had cofounded a Baltimore nonprofit, the Intersection, to teach the city\u2019s young people leadership and community organizing skills.<\/p>\n He told the Quarterly<\/em>, \u201cWhen we talk about inner-city kids, we talk about them as problems or at best as victims. I thought, \u2018What if we shifted the paradigm and let them be part of the solution?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now, in his second term as a Baltimore City councilman, Cohen is working to give voice to all in his local community.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, there is something about Baltimore that is extremely compelling,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is small enough that you can make a big impact, and it is large enough that it matters.\u201d<\/p>\n Odette Ramos\u2019 passion for community building and dogged persistence to find productive and fair solutions started early in her life. When she was in seventh grade, she saw first-hand the power citizens can have to enact change when she testified in front of her local city council to lobby for recycling. That night, the council approved the bill, and her passion for public service was ignited.<\/p>\n Three decades later and Ramos is still fighting for change. \u201cI get super mad and motivated to change something if it is not right,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Over the past 30 years, Ramos has worked in the Maryland General Assembly and neighborhood programs, including leading the Neighborhood Congress; she was founding director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance; and she started a consulting firm to support nonprofits and small businesses to become more effective.<\/p>\n Before running for city council, Ramos reflected on her work and her goals for helping her community and thought, \u201cDo you make better progress inside the process or outside?\u201d<\/p>\n She ultimately decided that she could affect change from the city council, and in 2020, Ramos was elected the first Latina to serve on the Baltimore City Council.<\/p>\n In 2020, Muller Paz\u2019s grassroots campaign for a Baltimore City Council seat focused on the city\u2019s youth and marginalized communities. In Baltimore, she had developed a deep connection to her community through her role in education.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a teacher in Baltimore City, it\u2019s been a long set of tough years,\u201d says Muller Paz, \u201cseeing everything our families are going through, struggling between financial stability and a deep sense of loss across the city, [with] students losing family members to violence as well as to some of the health issues that hold Baltimore back.\u201d<\/p>\n For Davis, connecting with and helping support his surrounding community grew beyond his teaching. He eventually became a neighborhood liaison for the Baltimore City Council, where he continued advocating for and working with kids and families.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my role in city government, they did not have direct connections and outreach to Latino and immigrant communities, so I worked on building those. Now, neighborhood engagement involves everyone regardless of immigration status and language,\u201d says Davis.<\/p>\n Cohen feels a deep obligation to the city. After being elected to Baltimore City Council in 2016, he is focused on using his time in office to enact substantive change.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, so much of our current moment we are in, with massive income inequity and reckoning of racial injustices, is reflective of failed governance and struggling democracy,\u201d he says. \u201cIn my mind, we have deprioritized civic education and teaching people how to participate in government. As a result, Baltimore is a city that is incredibly unequal and inequitable.\u201d<\/p>\n The scope of work varies wildly for the Baltimore City Council\u2014from dealing with abandoned vehicles to passing the city\u2019s more than $3 billion annual budget. In addition to constituent services, the council is currently considering or has passed reform initiatives aimed at helping address water and municipal service billing issues, combat illegal trash dumping throughout the city, and dedicate resources to cleaning the streets and alleyways.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter knocking on doors and talking to so many different people across the city, you see that everyone has a vision for the city,\u201d says Stuart-Sikowitz. \u201cWorking in a councilperson\u2019s office means that you can help make that happen, anything from getting a stop sign put in to working to pass legislation that a community member or community came up with.\u201d<\/p>\n The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the digital divide plaguing underserved communities. The city council and mayor have prioritized improving access to affordable internet services for communities of color and low-income areas. The lack of accessible internet to the city\u2019s poorest residents has dramatically impacted students who needed to rely on it for virtual learning.<\/p>\n Muller Paz sees investing in education as one solution to curbing the violence that has plagued the city. Harnessing and supporting the energy and enthusiasm of the city\u2019s youth and the work of young leaders across Baltimore is a crucial priority of her efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way that we can bring down the violence that has been hurting our city so much is by really investing in our young people and seeing how those opportunities could give them options,\u201d says Muller Paz.<\/p>\n Like many areas of the country, Baltimore\u2019s complicated history of race and class continues to contribute to inequities and disadvantages plaguing generations of residents. The current cohort of public servants recognizes the chronic injustice and prioritizes equity to help underserved communities in their work.<\/p>\n \u201cTo reverse the history of redlining in the city \u2026 we need the right tools to do it,\u201d says Ramos, referring to the practice that essentially barred Black people from getting loans to buy homes in certain neighbor\u00adhoods. For her, that toolbox would include changes in taxation policies and redevelopment that would support often overlooked citizens and neighborhoods.<\/p>\n Former Morgan State University Associate Professor Lawrence Brown refers to the pattern of disinvestment in Black communities across the city as \u201cthe black butterfly\u201d and recently released his book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America<\/em>. He has highlighted how Black and poor communities have been fragmented across Baltimore\u2019s eastern and western halves through past policies and budgets, creating a butterfly-like shape in the city\u2019s geography.<\/p>\n In Alice Kennedy\u2019s role as acting housing commissioner for the Baltimore City Department of Housing & Community Development, she and her department are prioritizing ways to create affordable housing and home ownership opportunities for residents throughout the city.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the foundational prescripts that I have embraced is the fact that equity in housing and community development must begin with acknowl\u00adedgement that the history of slavery and institutional racism is undeniably woven into the fabric of present conditions within the City,\u201d says Kennedy. \u201cThere must be an understanding and commitment to redress the long-standing race-based barriers and policies that have devastated neighborhoods, concentrated poverty, and created an affordable housing crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n She hopes to make a lasting impact on the community by being part of \u201can equitable solution that changes the lives of our residents.\u201d<\/p>\n Ramos is also focused on reversing the housing impact from redlining in the city and on reforming predatory housing practices, procurement policies, and taxation policies that disproportionately affect the city\u2019s poorest and most vulnerable residents.<\/p>\n \u201cIf people do not have healthy and stable homes and live next to vacant properties and feel like no one cares about them\u2014you are not going to prevent violence,\u201d says Ramos. \u201cTo me, transforming our city is actually about transforming our neighborhoods in an equitable and sustainable way.\u201d<\/p>\n While she is dedicated to serving all of her constit\u00aduents and cultivating a list of micro-level issues that help shape policy initiatives, Ramos also acknowledges that \u201cit doesn\u2019t escape me that I play a very important role as the first Hispanic elected official in Baltimore City. That is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n She says she believes that more people across the city are starting to pay attention to the needs of the Hispanic community, as they are the only population growing in Baltimore City. \u201cBeing able to lift those voices is important, and it is a role that I can play.\u201d<\/p>\n Transforming the city takes shape in many forms and programs.<\/p>\n For Cohen, the late Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings was a source of inspiration and had an enormous impact on him. Cummings was one of Cohen\u2019s mentors and the only politician to endorse Cohen in his first campaign. He remembers Cummings saying to a group of young leaders, \u201cI won\u2019t be here much longer. You need to pick up the torch and run with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Run, he did. In 2019, Cohen introduced the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act to help the city heal from ongoing racism and violence. The bill passed in 2020 and made Baltimore the first city in the country to legislate trauma-responsive care. Early in 2021, the Maryland General Assembly passed a similar bill to expand and implement trauma-informed care statewide.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of what I have seen throughout my career\u2014the violence, poverty\u2014is tied to trauma,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Cohen says that this legislation is what he is most proud of from his tenure in city government. He currently serves as co-chair to the Elijah Cummings task force charged with putting the act into action around the city.<\/p>\n While she lost her 2020 bid for election to the Baltimore City Council, Muller Paz\u2019s run as a Green Party candidate garnered much attention for its grassroots organizing and the momentum she built across her community and the city.<\/p>\n \u201cThe city needed to do its fair share in supporting our schools,\u201d says Muller Paz. \u201cTo see that become a narrative of the city, I hope that we played a small role in making sure that was an issue that was at the forefront of people\u2019s minds.\u201d<\/p>\n For those working in public service, the focus remains on the city and its people. To make positive change, they continue to work together and empower one another to create the community they each know is possible.<\/p>\n \u201cThe community leaders and folks who have been doing the work, in some cases for decades, and pulling their communities together\u2014there are so many unsung heroes,\u201d says Davis. \u201cThe way [Baltimore] is going to come back is through these people who never left.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A cohort of Goucher alumnae\/i is working in Baltimore City government to support equitable reforms for the city and its citizens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":360,"featured_media":3917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12633,87510],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87483],"class_list":["post-3855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-features"],"yoast_head":"\nFinding their way to public service<\/h2>\n
Vision for the city<\/h2>\n
Enacting real change<\/h2>\n