3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course offers a hands-on opportunity for students to develop new skills as community organizers by learning from the best teachers possible: residents who have been serving their neighborhoods and building grassroots power in Southwest Baltimore since the 1990s. As a community-based learning course with the Center for Social Concern, and co-taught by professors, archivists, cultural curators, and longtime residents, including the founder of Fayette Street Outreach, Ms. Edna Manns Lake, this course will leverage the narrative power of storytelling to help rewrite a multigenerational history of community organizing in a part of the city long neglected by local government and threatened historically by open-air drug markets, rampant criminalization, and predatory housing speculators. Through community immersion, including story circles, oral histories, community archiving, local meetings, and guest presentations, students will learn how to navigate, identify, and build upon existing neighborhood assets. Students will then collaborate with a community partner to co-design and complete a neighborhood project by the end of the semester. Dispelling myths, learning truths, documenting history, and honoring decades of struggle in the face of massive odds, students will help re-write the narrative of Southwest Baltimore, centering humanity and resilience among resident-activists who stayed and fought for their community.