Baltimore Community Fellowships
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© Open Society Institute
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Baltimore, Maryland
2008
Ashley Minner is Native American and an artist. So it was natural that she chose to use art as a tool to engage Baltimore’s Native American youth in a structured, out-of-school, community-based arts program. Her goal was to use the program to connect youth to each other and to their culture, and also to educate the broader Baltimore community about the Native American community. She also hoped, initially, that by doing those things, she could help revitalize the Baltimore American Indian Center in Southeast Baltimore.
Minner soon learned not to try to do it all. “This has been a continual life lesson about learning to say no, because you can spread yourself too thin and not really be effective at anything,” she said.
The art program has been a great success; and awareness has been raised in the city about the small, but significant Native American population in Baltimore.
“I think this project has done a lot to help that already,” Minner says.
“I had to learn that I had the opportunity to do something new; the project didn’t have to be connected to anything else,” Minner said. “I had to realize the fellowship for what it was: opportunity and freedom.”
Minner also learned that developing partnerships would make her project run more smoothly. She formed alliances with close to two dozen groups, agencies and organizations, including the Creative Alliance, the Foster Grandparent Program and many others.
“Some of the really key partnerships came from OSI and Fusion (a fiscal sponsor organization),” Minner says. “But others were really serendipitous -- they just found me. Without the partnerships that were developed over the course of my fellowship, the project wouldn’t have been realized.”
This fall, Minner will let go of the reins of her project by taking time out to get a Master of Fine Arts degree at Maryland Institute College of Art. “To be authentic in what I’m trying to teach young people in my community, I have to be practicing it as well,” she says.
But she has passed on knowledge and leadership to others who have joined her over the course of the fellowship and will stay on during the next year in an advisory capacity.
She credits OSI with teaching her how to be invested and involved without being overwhelmed. “Without OSI, I would still be simply getting through everyday life without realizing my potential to make greater change,” she says. “They gave me the best gift of all which was freedom.”
