Baltimore Community Fellowships
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© Open Society Institute
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Baltimore, Maryland
2008
Cydne Kimbrough has long known she wanted to fight discrimination against many in Baltimore’s transgender community, particularly unfair treatment in housing, employment and by law enforcement officials. Through her organization, GLASS (Gender Learning Advocacy Support System) Baltimore, Kimbrough used her fellowship to foster tolerance and understanding and help that community in practical ways as well. What Kimbrough didn’t know was that she’d have to fight so hard.
“Everything I’ve done has been a struggle, particularly funding,” said Kimbrough, herself a transgender woman. “No one wanted to touch this. Everyone saw that it was an issue, they knew who it was affecting and why, and how it could be fixed. But no one wanted to help it.”
With her OSI fellowship, Kimbrough was able to develop or solidify several key partnerships, including with Women Accepting Responsibility (WAR), a nonprofit specializing in women’s issues, Hearts and Ears, a nonprofit focusing on mental health strategies in the GLBT community and Echo House, a substance abuse facility in West Baltimore, which provided Kimbrough with office space and resources for her clients.
“It could never have happened without them,” Kimbrough says. “None of our successes would have happened without them.”
Among her victories: Kimbrough was able to get more transgender people to visit one of WAR’s mobile testing units to uncover – and hopefully treat – sexually transmitted diseases. The outreach helped WAR report to the state a shocking 50-percent HIV rate among Baltimore’s transgender community.
Kimbrough had hoped that such deliverables would convince the city or state to bring her – and the support of transgender people – on in an official capacity, but that has yet to happen.
So Kimbrough is revamping and returning to her roots.
“I’m moving back to training and education of the general public and agencies and schools so people understand what it means to be a transgender person,” she says. “That’s my strong suit. My task now is to market that in a way to be able to pay my bills.”
Kimbrough’s difficulty getting public agencies to focus on the highly-charged issue makes her even more grateful for OSI’s support. “Without the OSI fellowship, this never would have happened at all,” she says. “That has been proven just in the last two years trying to get other people involved. OSI was the only one willing to really take this on. No one else would have ever been that audacious.”
