Baltimore Community Fellowships
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Baltimore, Maryland
2005
Many of Baltimore's young people have never left the city. To Michelle DeBruin, the response should not be a one-day field trip out of town, but instead backpacking several days through the wilderness.
DeBruin recognized the value of such outings while working in a wilderness therapy program in North Carolina. Now settled in Baltimore, DeBruin teaches in the Community Learning Life Program, an alternative high school in the Hampden neighborhood that enrolls about 40 teenagers who have not been successful in traditional settings. During the last year, she took several groups of students on extended backpacking trips, with several goals in mind: leaving the city, learning about nature, prompting soul-searching and "hearing the silence of the wilderness."
"There is a resistance, especially for city kids who may not have experienced complete darkness before, who hadn't even been out of the city before," she says. "But I want them to have a sense of what they can accomplish, to realize there are things in life that will be a struggle, and that they have what it takes to overcome that struggle."
DeBruin, who studied sculpture and weaving at the Maryland Institute College of Art, will also work with students on a variety of community art projects this year, and long-term plans call for an extended backpacking trip through Nicaragua in the summer of 2007.
