We are fortunate to have this guest post from the Associate Director of Johns Hopkins University Student Outreach Resource Center (SOURCE). Global service-learning occurs everywhere there is deliberate, community-driven, cross-cultural engagement and service that includes critically reflective consideration of global structures, power, privilege, and positionality. Employing such a lens and set of commitments, we hope, will push us to co-create the building blocks of social justice. Clearly, SOURCE has some partners who may lift us and challenge us in these essential efforts. – EH

“The temptation of course is to see this whole thing as an event. The temptation is to suggest that the murder of Freddie Gray by police caused this whole eruption of energy and emotion and rage, and now that charges have been filed, we can get back to normal. Except the normal we want to get back to is the normal that murdered Freddie Gray. The normal we want to get back to is a normal that ignores the continued deplorable circumstances and barriers to opportunity so many black sisters and brothers endure daily because the system is in need of such radical reform.”

– Pastor Gary Dittman

By Elizabeth Doerr

“How many of you are not from Baltimore?” Mindi Levin, Founder and Director of SOURCE – the community service and service-learning center for the Johns Hopkins University health professional schools – asks a crowd of prospective public health students.

Nearly every hand shoots up, with one or two outliers, at most.

She acknowledges what she already knew before asking the question – that hardly any of these new students know much about the city they’re about to spend their health education career in. She knows most of them came to Baltimore for Hopkins, not for the city.

She proceeds, “Well, I’m about to tell you more about Baltimore beyond what you saw in The Wire.”

The crowd chuckles. They know there’s a public depiction of the city. Maybe it’s all they knew about the city before they came here. Maybe their friends and family members warned them against the dangers of the city they knew mostly from the David Simon series. Maybe they came here despite that reputation.

The Wire is arguably one of the best television shows ever made and has exposed many problems in urban politics, policing, the criminal justice system, and the list goes on. But, it has also been one of the main sources of Baltimore City’s reputation proliferated across the rest of the country and world. So, when new students from the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine, Nursing or Public Health come to Baltimore from all over the country and world to attend one of – if not the most – prestigious school in their field, they also come with preconceived notions of the city in which they’ll be doing their schooling. They arrive with images of drugs, shootings, violence, police chases, and now – thanks in part to the imagery provided by national media coverage of recent events – looting and rioting.

That’s why my center, SOURCE (Student Outreach Resource Center), is actively trying to work against that narrative from the moment students step foot in Baltimore for their orientations. Although this is what our center does on a day-to-day basis, the Baltimore Uprisings in April – and especially the subsequent negative media about “Baltimore burning” – prompted important conversations and reactions on working to not only reframe the narrative in a moment of crisis, but to make the positive aspects of Baltimore and the incredible people working in the community intrinsically a part of health professional education at Hopkins.

SOURCE emphasizes building relationships and becoming a member of this active and vibrant community of people, even if you’re only here for your one year of grad school. This is done through myriad program options that range from the standard one-day volunteer day to academic year-long fellowship programs. Through these programs, we partner with over 100 non-profits all based in Baltimore City. SOURCE’s unique partnership model – where organizations apply for partnership and are reviewed by our center’s Governing Board – ensures mutuality and reciprocity by establishing long-lasting relationships with not only the organizations, but the individuals that work there. Knowing the organization, their ongoing needs, and being able to translate those into academic projects is how we establish community-identified projects.

Since SOURCE was established as a tri-school center for community engagement in 2005 (serving the Hopkins Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health), Mindi Levin has provided students with an orientation about how they can get involved in Baltimore City through volunteering and service-learning and learn about where they’ll be spending the next one to five years.

Meanwhile, in a separate orientation session, during those early years, representatives from corporate security provided detailed guidelines on where and where not to walk – going so far as giving specific street names that marked the security boundaries of the East Baltimore medical campus – and make statements such as “if you leave anything in your cars, you will be a victim.”

The fear such strong warnings instills almost immediately trumps any idea to engage with people beyond university boundaries. Corporate security’s narrative sent a strong message to students: engaging with the community is dangerous. Because this impacted SOURCE’s work and the university’s ability to engage authentically and responsibly with Baltimore City communities, Mindi, Mike Ward, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health leaders approached corporate security in 2008 to urge them to change their message.

Since then, SOURCE has had a considerable presence in all of the health professional schools’ orientations, and even in the accepted student events where students come to campus before they make their grad school decisions. Now, the strong corporate security warnings are gone (or at least toned down), replaced with extended introductions to SOURCE’s work, how to get involved through volunteer days, how to translate the theory you’re working on in the community to practice, and even panel discussions with students who live in Baltimore answering questions about their city. During these panel discussions, the question “is it safe to live in Baltimore?” inevitably comes up. The message typically is, “yes, in most places. However, like any urban community, you need to exercise caution, but you also need to get to know the community.”

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When the Baltimore Uprisings occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, on the evening of Monday, April 27^th, the narrative that was broadcast – or rather exploded – around the country was centered on the many variations of the headline “Baltimore Burns!” Stories that ignored the fact that thousands of protestors demonstrated peacefully for justice for Freddie Gray just a few days prior. Stories that solidified America’s perspective that this is an inevitability for the city that gave us The Wire. To them, it was The Wire times a thousand.

What we, as residents, saw in Baltimore was very different. Certainly the night where the uprisings began was a scary evening for many individuals, especially those businesses that were damaged or destroyed. One of our SOURCE community partners, Todd Marcus, the president of Newborn Holistic Ministries which operates in West Baltimore along Pennsylvania Avenue says about the activity, “That was eerie. There was no knowing what the extent of things would be.”

He and other organization leaders and business owners stood in front of their property to make sure it wasn’t damaged. But, what he saw very quickly was the community coming together to protect one another. He says of Mrs. Harris (one of the co-founders of his organization along with her husband Elder Harris), “[She] is a short little lady, short in stature, but mighty in everything about her. Between her and Martha’s Place [one of NHM’s programs], they went out to keep an eye on things. So, that kind of community rallying, I thought that was really special.”

It was these kind of moments that proved glimmers of hope and peace broke through the negative coverage – the gang members who formed a truce in order to call for peace and the clergy that marched together in the midst of the activity to call for peace. Examples of community coming together.

This community-mindedness continued and expanded the next morning when things calmed down. Marcus says, “the next day was relief as we had community members mobilizing for a community clean-up. We were really touched by hundreds and hundreds of folks from outside our neighborhood.”

We saw this happening all over the city and stories about the Bolton Hill hardware store that local residents ran to protect the night before, Baltimore communities coming together to clean up their neighborhoods, the stories of people, like Elder Harris from NHM, who have been doing good work all along in Baltimore and are working to help their community understand what happened and rebuild.

We saw this in East Baltimore near the JHU health professional schools as well. The University was closed that Tuesday, but my SOURCE colleagues and I decided to meet up with our community partner, Amazing Grace Lutheran Church, to help with the clean-up efforts. By 10am when people were scheduled to convene, the work had already been completed by the neighborhood business association and local residents. So, the volunteers participated in an impromptu clean-up of a community that is neglected most days of the year, not just in moments of crisis like the uprisings. Side-by-side, Amazing Grace congregation members, students, and McElderry Park community members worked together. These spirits rose out of the uprisings. Many of the people who came to help clean up didn’t reside in the neighborhood.

Pastor Gary Dittman of Amazing Grace also comments on the beauty of coming together, “The next day was really beautiful, everyone coming together I loved what happened at Amazing Grace. Someone put music speakers out, we got tables and chairs, and we got lunch, people came and brought food. We just had this time to be together and this time to eat together and time to clean up together. It was just this beautiful moment, I thought it was really lovely because the city just came together to rebuild.”

The day after the Uprisings began was also a galvanizing moment for the health professional schools, the University and SOURCE. Brought together by passionate public health students, Bloomberg School of Public Health leaders, including our Director, Mindi Levin, met to coordinate a response. While the students worked on organizing an event for May 8^th, Engage Baltimore, focused on strengthening dialog between Baltimore and the JHU health professional schools, SOURCE’s efforts flourished in real time on Facebook.

Consistently a touch stone for members of Hopkins to connect with SOURCE, we saw our page activity increase by 3,000% receiving over 200 followers within just a few days and our reach peaking over 4,000 views in the first few days of May. Although this was great for us as a center, we saw this as evidence that people here were eager to be involved in a positive way and to do it on the community’s terms.

At SOURCE, what we saw from our students – the ones you’ll recall are mostly not from Baltimore – was not fear, not a desire to leave, not caution, but a call for solidarity and love for the city. In those days following the uprisings, we saw positivity and love for the city that we all call home. It was a lesson to us that we had done our job and that at the very least, the script was flipped for our students already here.

What happened was beautiful. But, there is the question that lies beyond the uprisings. The question of what to do next.

Pastor Dittman wrote in a Facebook post the week after the uprisings,

“The temptation of course is to see this whole thing as an event. The temptation is to suggest that the murder of Freddie Gray by police caused this whole eruption of energy and emotion and rage, and now that charges have been filed, we can get back to normal. Except the normal we want to get back to is the normal that murdered Freddie Gray. The normal we want to get back to is a normal that ignores the continued deplorable circumstances and barriers to opportunity so many black sisters and brothers endure daily because the system is in need of such radical reform.”

What Pastor Dittman describes, as being enlightened to and doing something about the systemic inequalities is the next step. It’s a question we at SOURCE also struggle with. Much of what we do is educate about the history of Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University and Hospital’s relationship to the community. Acknowledging the history and how it has formed the inequalities and social injustices we see today is a part of how we enlighten our educational community about Baltimore.

The real challenge moving forward is continuing to address the challenges of the city without forgetting about the uprisings. But, it’s also to increase our ability to demonstrate that this goes beyond Baltimore.

We have done our job in introducing new students to the positive aspect of Baltimore, teaching them not to fear and to get engaged. But, what comes next is social justice. We already do this to a small extent through service-learning programs that foster critical reflection. Over the past three years, we’ve increased the number of our service-learnings courses from three to twenty-two in the health professional schools; courses that challenge students to apply how their learning in public policy, epidemiology, and even biology relates to the community and social justice. This is largely due to the training faculty and community partners receive to become effective service-learning and social justice educators in and outside of the classroom through the SOURCE Service-Learning Faculty & Community Fellows Program.

But, we wish we could bring this further, that we could make this into a larger scale impact. We’re working towards institutional cultural change where we not only talk about the principles of public health or nursing or medicine, but also challenge students and our institutions to focus on the root causes (often talked of as healthcare disparities in the health fields) and make that a core part of Johns Hopkins health professional education. It was heartening to see the many articles like the Washington Post piece about the “Long, Painful and Repetitive History of how Baltimore became Baltimore” by Emily Badger, surface and being shared all over social media. It’s these kind of discussions we want to be having in the classroom regardless of the course that’s being taught, because it all relates.

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In July, we’ll have a new crop of Masters in Public Health (MPH) students come in – one of the many degree programs we work with. If it’s anything like last year, among the 280 MPH students only about 6% (or 16 people) will be from Baltimore. We will have our work cut out for us. These students are skilled, committed, and high-achieving, but they also probably saw “Baltimore burning” in the news like the rest of the nation.

We don’t know if they saw what we saw on the ground – the love, the support, the community focus, the committed organizations, and the solidarity. We don’t know if they’re coming in with a higher level of fear. We don’t know if they are coming in with a higher sense of the historical context of the events. But, what we do know, is that they don’t know Baltimore like we do and we need to continue these conversations and make sure these students are a part of it.

What we also need to do is not ignore what happened in April. We need to address it. Although most of these students won’t stick around the city when they graduate, they will be going back to somewhere that all of these lessons apply.

“Here’s the thing is that it’s across the country – it’s everywhere,” Pastor Dittman says about the systemic injustices. “I know Baltimore has its own unique set. But, look at Cleveland. I came from a small town and it’s there, too.”

This year, when Mindi speaks to the new students about Baltimore, it’s not just going to be The Wire that she references, but what the students probably saw in the news only weeks before they arrived. Her talk is a call to action and a call to bring those students to a place where they can help their family and friends across the nation flip the narrative of Baltimore. But, also, it’s a call to action to think more critically about the world and country we live in. A call to action to acknowledge and explore social justice (and injustices) within our education, whatever we decide to study and wherever we decide to do it.

Elizabeth Doerr is the Associate Director of SOURCE (Student Outreach Resource Center), the community service and service-learning center serving the Johns Hopkins University’s Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health. In this position, Elizabeth primarily focuses on integrating academic service-learning into the health professional schools. Previously, she was the Coordinator for Leadership & Community Service-Learning, Immersion Experiences at the University of Maryland, College Park where she ran UMD’s Alternative Breaks program. Elizabeth has lived, worked and traveled extensively in Latin America and Africa.  Elizabeth served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi, Southeastern Africa where her primary focus was HIV/AIDS education.  She earned her MA in International Education Policy from the University of Maryland and her BA in Rhetoric/Media Studies and Spanish at Willamette University in Salem, OR.