OTHER PROJECTS
A Revolutionary Summer
A Revolutionary Summer is an intensive critical reading and writing program dedicated to shifting harmful narratives about Black women and girls through the meaningful study and creation of art and the deliberate application of self-inquiry. Founded in 2015, A Revolutionary Summer presents Black girls with authentic representations of themselves and contributes forcefully and unapologetically to a sound and solid Black girl future.
The young women involved in A Revolutionary Summer’s programming engage in the critical analysis of complex, worthy texts, films, albums, photographs, and paintings; develop discursive and intuitive writing skills; identify, analyze and work to do away with oppressive values they buy into; make self-loving decisions; and more.
Arch Social Club
Since it was established in 1905, the Arch Social Club has stood proudly as a cornerstone for Baltimore’s African American civic, political, and cultural life. Historically, the club brought together tradesmen, laborers, clergy, professionals and entrepreneurs, serving as a a meeting place for the civil rights movement while welcoming world-renowned performers like Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and James Brown to its stage. More recently, the Arch Social Club served as a safe-house and comfort station during the demonstrations that followed the death of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray.
Located at the center of Baltimore’s famed Pennsylvania Avenue, the Arch Social Club is set to play a pivotal role once again as plans are formed to establish an African American Arts & Entertainment District and welcome a new generation of activists, artists, entrepreneurs and patrons.
ArtsCentric
ArtsCentric is a color-conscious organization focused on becoming the premier theater company in the nation for developing works of color. Committed to re-examining traditional roles in the arts, ArtsCentric advances original stories of specific cultures and fosters educational advancement to strengthen the community through the power of theatre. ArtsCentric envisions a cultural arts center as a safe-haven for all members of the community to experience the lives and perspectives of the world through the performing arts.
Partnering with schools, churches, and community-based businesses and organizations, ArtsCentric provides thought-provoking productions, creative initiatives, entertainment and educational shows for various programs and events and uses the arts to inform, change, and enhance the lives of others.
Baltimore Algebra Project
With a focus on adequate employment, proper healthcare, and safety, Baltimore Algebra Project is a youth-led organization working to ensure that all students have access to quality education. Baltimore Algebra Project places a specific emphasis on mastering advanced math, which they pay Baltimore City youth a living wage to teach to their peers.
Black Yield Institute
The Black Yield Institute is an emerging Pan-African institution that is transforming Baltimore’s food system. The Black Yield Institute is building independent power by establishing an action network and incubator for Black people and entities pursuing Black food sovereignty.
Believing that structural transformation happens when the work is led by people most affected by injustice and human rights violations, the Black Yield Institute advocates for transformation in Baltimore’s food system to be led by Black people engaging in the praxis of collective self-determination and firmly asserts that consistent, strategic, and collective action is necessary in order to secure political, economic, cultural, spiritual and social capital.
Baltimore Rock Opera Society
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society is a passionate and energetic community of actors, writers, designers, builders, musicians, and artists with the sole mission of producing original live rock operas in Baltimore.
BYKE Collective
The Baltimore Youth Kinetic Energy (BYKE) Collective is a youth enrichment program dedicated to personal and professional development. BYKE members learn bicycle mechanics, practice safe ridership, and build community. Using restorative justice practices, BYKE advocates for violence prevention and takes on the school-to-prison 'landslide.'
Open to young people ages 10-17, BYKE offers a comprehensive, STEM based curriculum, including one-on-one guidance from Mechanic Mentors. At BYKE, young people can fix their own bikes and earn credits for bikes and bike parts by helping others and supporting the bike shop. Youth facilitate meetings to discuss goals, accomplishments, and frustrations pertaining to issues faced inside and outside the shop.
CityLit Project
The CityLit Project nurtures the culture of literature in Baltimore and throughout Maryland. Creating enthusiasm for literary arts, CityLit connects a community of avid readers and writers and creates opportunities for young people and diverse audiences to embrace the literary arts.
CityLit’s signature event, the CityLit Festival, is a day-long celebration that has been headlined by Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Genius grant recipients, and Poet Laureates.
Fight Blight Bmore
Fight Blight Bmore is a community-led and data-driven economic, environmental, and social justice initiative addressing blight in Baltimore. Fight Blight Bmore educates people about the impact of blight and is in the process of creating a mobile application that individuals will be able to use to identify, report, and analyze blight data.
Greenmount West Community Association
The Greenmount West Community Association is a volunteer membership-based group working to improve the quality of life within the Greenmount West community through communication, engagement, participation, and advocacy. Greenmount West is a rapidly growing, revitalizing neighborhood rich in diversity in Central Baltimore. It is one of two neighborhoods that comprise the North Central Historic District and is also part of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District.
I am Okah! Inc.
Named in memory of Kahdine Ann DaCosta, I am O’Kah was founded in 2011 to empower youth to unlock their greatest potential through mentorship, scholarships, and programs that help them navigate through socio-economic barriers to success. I am O’Kah’s curriculum provides tangible life lessons facilitated by trained mentors and equips youth in grades 4-12 to excel academically; explore self-reliance through learning entrepreneurship; earn, manage and invest money to achieve financial security; and lead lives fueled by confidence in their vision and purpose.
Jubilee Arts
Jubilee Arts is a community program providing dance, visual arts, creative writing, and ceramics classes to the residents of the Sandtown-Winchester, Upton, and surrounding neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland. Located on Pennsylvania Avenue, an area with a rich history of African-American culture, Jubilee Arts opened in 2009 and is cultivating a creative and community-oriented space through art, dance, writing classes and projects.
Media Rhythm Institute
The Media Rhythm Institute (MRI) is a collection of youth programs that use Hip Hop and media industry skills to promote STEM, entrepreneurship, and academic success. MRI believes in meeting youth where they are and using their current interests to engage them in life skills that will improve their chances of success and enhance academic achievement.
Mera Kitchen Collective
Mera Kitchen Collective is a community-driven, food-based cooperative focused on empowerment of refugee and immigrant women by tapping into their passion for cooking, self-expression and creating community. Mera's chefs come from all over the world and are here seeking refuge; they are eager to put their skills back to use to re-establish an independent, sustainable livelihood.
Mera Kitchen Collective is a worker-owned cooperative: each chef has ownership in an enterprise that was built together. This allows for each individual to not only strengthen their culinary expertise, but also build equity and have a voice in the operations. Proceeds go to our chefs, their families, and to support refugees in Baltimore.
Press Press
Press Press is an interdisciplinary publishing initiative established in 2014. Press Press's publishing practice is organized around shifting and deepening the understanding of voices, identities, and narratives that have been suppressed or misrepresented by the mainstream. Their work has so far focused on immigration and race in the United States as well as building networks of relationships through publishing practices centered on self-representation and gathering.
Press Press’s streams of work include public cultural programming, an open-access publishing studio that’s based on an Exchange Economy, youth publishing workshops in an immigrant and refugee only space, and the ongoing production of print and digital publications.
Roots & Raices Festival
Roots & Raíces is a platform for immigrant voices to be represented in the arts. Based in Baltimore, MD, Roots & Raices advocates for and supports immigrants through the arts. At their annual festival, immigrants and their allies perform, promote, and celebrate immigrant contributions to the United States.
Station North Tool Library
The Station North Tool Library (SNTL) is a tool-lending library and community hub in the heart of Baltimore City, offering over 3,000 tools, 30 classes, a public woodworking shop, a dedicated DIY workspace, and a home repair classroom. Their space is a welcoming environment where people can be creative and learn to work with their hands. SNTL seeks to empower all people to improve their lives and environments through affordable access to tools, skills, and workspace.
United Workers
Founded in 2002 by homeless day laborers meeting in an abandoned firehouse-turned-shelter and inspired by past human rights struggles, United Workers is a non-partisan poor people’s multi-racial and bilingual human rights organization fighting to secure the human rights of everyone, everywhere. Their successes are achieved by organizing low-wage workers around human rights values of respect, dignity and sanctity of human life, and by developing leaders from the ranks of the poor. Since 2013, they have organized, mobilized, and catalyzed neighborhoods and partners around these principles in three particular areas of focus: public subsidies to developers; environmental justice; and housing.
Wombwork Productions
WombWork Productions, Inc. of Baltimore, MD, is a comprehensive production company that seeks to heal and empower youth, families, and communities through the performing arts. Their performances tackle relevant social issues endemic throughout the Baltimore community including: gun violence, domestic abuse, grief, drug/alcohol abuse, gang violence, sexual assault, and racial equity. Community performances also serve to enrich the local neighborhoods through cultural programs incorporating elements of traditional African dancing, singing, and performing with contemporary elements of hip-hop, spoken word, and rap.
All programming incorporates their arts-based model, which uses principles of system change, experiential right brain learning, culturally congruent learning, and artistic expressions (acting, dance, music, singing, creative writing) to formulate and build character while focusing on developing artistic talents, leadership skills, and self-discipline; increasing awareness of social issues; increasing life skills; imparting virtues; and providing tools for self-transformation.
Youth Empowered Society
The Youth Empowered Society (YES) Drop-In Center is Baltimore City’s first and only drop-in center for homeless youth. The YES Drop-In Center is a safe space where youth between the ages of 14-25 who are experiencing homelessness can get basic needs met and establish supportive relationships with peer staff and allies that make and sustain connections to long-term resources and opportunities.
Founded and run by formerly homeless youth and their allies, YES works to end youth homelessness in Baltimore by providing urgently-needed direct services to youth experiencing homelessness, developing the leadership and employment readiness of youth who have experienced homelessness, and engaging in system-level reform.
Undoing Racism Initiative
Recognizing that structural racism presents a massive barrier to progress in the Baltimore community, the Deutsch Foundation began hosting Undoing Racism workshops facilitated by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond in 2015. These intensive 20-hour events challenge participants to analyze the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity, and prepare them to be effective organizers for justice.
The Digital Access Equity Report in Baltimore City
The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and Media Democracy Fund commissioned The Raben Group, a national public affairs firm, to conduct a series of interviews on digital equity issues in Baltimore City and the surrounding area. Interviewees included leaders from the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. More specifically, interviewees included: political appointees and career staff within the Mayor’s office; individuals from the public health community; policymakers and technologists from the public school system; real estate and economic development experts; leaders at tech and makerspace organizations; executives from nonprofit and community based organizations (in areas such as education, housing, child care, and the arts); and small business owners.
Believe in Music
Believe in Music provides innovative music education experiences for Baltimore youth through state-of-the-art production technology and self-expression. The program helps students develop into artists, introducing them to professionals in the music industry, and exposing them to educational and employment opportunities.
Neighborhood Design Center
The Neighborhood Design Center provides access to pro bono planning and design services to over 3,000 community initiatives in Baltimore City and Prince George’s County. Since 1968, NDC has helped underserved communities build new playgrounds, reclaim vacant lots and abandoned buildings, revitalize commercial districts, create community master plans, and beautify their neighborhoods.
Baltimore Brew
Baltimore Brew is an independent daily news website, staffed by veteran journalists committed to providing fresh, fair, insightful and reliable reporting about Baltimore. A fixture in Baltimore since 2010, The Brew specializes in aggressive accountability reporting – looking at campaign cash, development deals, government spending, city services, and more.
Media Democracy Fund
The Media Democracy Fund develops strategies and builds networks that protect and expand essential rights in the digital age. They are a vital catalyst for an open, accessible and secure Internet. The Deutsch Foundation is partnering with MDF on a three-year effort to conduct research, assess needs, and create a holistic digital equity plan for Baltimore City.
AKIMBO
AKIMBO Dance Festival was an annual festival of site-specific dance and movement art in Station North Arts and Entertainment District, which began in 2012. Each annual AKIMBO showcased more than 100 dancers, musicians and artists performing in restaurants, galleries, parks, and on street corners.
Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance
The GBCA is a membership and service organization that nurtures and promotes a vibrant, diverse, and sustainable arts and cultural community essential to the region’s economic success and quality of life. Created by cultural leaders and artists in 2001 to work toward common goals, GBCA convenes the sector around critical issues of strategic importance. Programming includes grants and awards for artists, as well as advocacy, professional development, tools for marketing, and capacity building, while ensuring that the creative economy thrives and is recognized for its many contributions to the region’s economic success. Membership includes arts, culture, history, heritage, humanities organizations, attractions and artists in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford, and Howard counties in Maryland.
Arts & Technology Policy Fellowship at Fractured Atlas
The Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellowship at Fractured Atlas informed and engaged the artistic community in federal policy discussions at the junction of communications, technology and the arts. Courtney Duffy was the Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow for 2015-16. In this role, Duffy was responsible for informing and engaging the artistic community in federal policy discussions at the junction of communications, technology and the arts.
Allosphere at UC-Santa Barbara
Imagine diagnosing a neurological disease by flying through the cortex of a human brain, examining brain activity through data presented beautifully with color and sound. Imagine creating transparent solar cells to power mobile devices by expanding our understanding of the multicenter hydrogen bond, using different hues and sounds to identify the various atoms.
These are among the cutting-edge research projects the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation supported at the University of California, Santa Barbara to explore the intersection of engineering, science, technology and art. The Foundation funded five graduate fellowships in the Media Arts and Technology program to pursue work conducted between the university's Experimental Visualization Lab and the AlloSphere Research Facility. The former, led by Professor George Legrady, focuses on data visualization, computational photography and arts-engineering collaboration; the latter is a 30-foot diameter immersive sphere built within a three-story cube, which allows for analysis of large data sets in a virtual simulation of full sensorial perception.
BioFab at University of Maryland College Park
Researchers at the University of Maryland are creating microscale living laboratories to investigate biochemical reaction pathways and biological nanofactories capable of initiating communications among bacteria in a major, multidisciplinary research program in biofabrication. Their work is part of the emerging field of nanoscale biotechnology that aims to create new technologies for the development of drugs, the detection of disease and the delivery of therapeutics within living organisms.
The Deutsch Foundation supported post-doctoral and graduate fellows to work in biofab-research programs and collaborate across their respective disciplines, supplying early stage support for these fellows so that they and their faculty mentors could build out a base of research that could attract larger grants from federal agencies and other funders.
Createquity
Createquity is a research-backed investigation of the most important issues in the arts and what we, collectively and individually, can do about them. Founded in October 2007 by Ian David Moss, Createquity rapidly gained acclaim from readers across the web and has been called “the strongest, most provocative, well-connected arts [blog] that exists today” and “so amazingly good it’s almost in its own category of resource.” Once a one-person shop, Createquity now boasts a full-fledged editorial team and has published work by nearly 50 writers.
Urban Teachers
Urban Teachers, formerly named Urban Teacher Center, was founded in 2009 to solve a critical challenge in urban education: new teacher quality. They built a break-the-mold teacher preparation program from the ground up to ensure every teacher would get the experiences and support they need to produce results with students.
Urban Teachers began in two of the highest-need districts in the nation: Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC. Since 2010, they have welcomed more than 500 aspiring teachers for district and charter schools in both cities. Urban Teachers provides urban students with the high-quality education they deserve by preparing a great teacher, every time.
The 6th Branch
The 6th Branch utilizes the leadership and organizational skills of military veterans to execute aggressive community service initiatives in Baltimore City. They believe that the military skill set is ideal for the initiation and organization of community projects. Their organization aims to empower veterans by utilizing the characteristics typically strengthened through military service, such as a sense of mission, a dedication to duty, and a love of country. They build community by bringing together service-minded veterans and civilians to serve our community on the home front.
Young Audiences of Maryland
The local affiliate of Young Audiences, the nation's largest education network, envisions a Maryland where the arts are valued for their capacity to transform lives. Through culturally diverse arts programs within the schools, Young Audiences partners with professional artists from across disciplines to bring hands-on arts learning experiences into the classroom.
