Baltimore Community Fellowships
Baltimore Community FellowshipsApplication Guidelines | Fellows & Grantees | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
At the beginning of her fellowship, Deborah Patterson was focused on bringing art to children in one community.
With the help of OSI's Community Fellows initiative-which helps social entrepreneurs turn nuggets of ideas into reality-Patterson has accomplished that idea and expanded her vision to include all of Baltimore.
What started out as ARTEnriches, a program teaching art to about 150 children, ages 5 to 14, at the Pimlico Road Arts and Community Center, now has become ARTblocks, a nonprofit organization that strives to be a place where community arts groups in neighborhoods all over the city can come to exchange ideas, share resources and create unique, community-inspired art.
"The idea for ARTblocks is to work with existing neighborhood groups to help them flesh out their ideas, and create short- and long-term goals for what they want to do for and with their neighborhoods," says Patterson. "It's starting in Pimlico. But each neighborhood is unique and is expressed through its art. So the goal is to have ARTblocks all over Baltimore."
Patterson credits her fellowship with giving her the tools and time she needed to create her new nonprofit. "Basically I look at the 18 months as laying the foundation for what I'm now building," Patterson says. "All the lessons I knew going into it have been cemented through this process."
For example, Patterson says she always believed that community projects had to be grassroots in nature. But after working with parents and local churches in the Pimlico community, she says she really gets it. "It has to come from the community," she says. "It cannot be top-down."
Patterson says she also learned that collaborations with others are invaluable.
"The fellowship really helped me gain access to partners and other resources that I might not have gotten otherwise," Patterson says.
In addition to her work with churches and parents, Patterson also collaborated with Baltimore Clayworks, a nonprofit ceramic art center that shares space in the building, Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University, among others.
The partnerships helped bring art to the children in Pimlico. Now, she hopes she can bring what she's learned to other art groups around the city.
"If we're community based and collaborative, I think this can be sustainable. Those are the things I most learned," Patterson says. "I feel really good about what we accomplished, what we were able to provide for the kids. And I'm very excited about what we can do with ARTblocks.
"That's the cool part of life-when it evolves into something that you couldn't even foresee."
