Baltimore Community Fellowships
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© Open Society Institute
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Baltimore, Maryland
2008
Joyce Smith, a longtime community activist, started her fellowship intending to develop a health and nutrition awareness initiative for southwest Baltimore residents. She intended to stay as grassroots as possible, educating low-income residents on how to eat nutritional food, as well as developing innovative activities and projects – such as community gardens – that create healthy lifestyles.
But Smith soon found out that her project idea was both too big and too small.
“I didn’t realize how many people just aren’t aware of healthy eating and don’t connect it with movement and exercising, and how those things connect to overall health,” Smith said. “Most people just eat to satisfy hunger or because they’re bored.”
Smith had to learn to break those basic ideas down into digestible chunks to get community members to understand that food and exercise choices are directly linked to the alarming prevalence of several chronic diseases in southwest Baltimore, such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
But Smith also learned that just dealing with people’s behaviors wasn’t thinking big enough.
Working with partners such as Operation ReachOut Southwest, the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University and the Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation, Smith realized that politics played a role in the food options her community were handed.
“Even if you have folks who want to make necessary lifestyle changes, we don’t have a lot of healthy foods available in the community,” she said. “The food industry doesn’t focus on having healthy choices, especially in low-income areas.”
Smith now has gotten involved with the Baltimore City Food Policy Council, established within the city planning department to address the lack of access and availability of healthy food choices especially in low-income areas.
Smith worked with Johns Hopkins University on an intergenerational diet project, where she and a relative reviewed the diet and eating habits of previous generations of her own family and compared them to current generations. And she’s also a member of the city health department’s salt reduction task force.
But her heart is still with her grassroots beginnings, and Smith said she would advise any new fellow to stay true to whatever sparked initial interest in the fellowship – even if projects take a turn.
“My plans are to establish ongoing relationships with others doing projects around food and healthy eating,” she said. “I would like to become the community voice around projects being planned, such as at the city health department. I followed my passion, and things just fell into place. So I would tell new fellows to follow their passions.”
Smith is grateful to OSI for helping to broaden her passion into a real program for change.
“Without the OSI fellowship, I would have never become aware of how unhealthy lifestyles can be, not only in inner-city, urban communities but also in the nation,” Smith said. “And I wouldn’t have known how policies contribute to that. That’s why I want people to understand the bigger picture of what has happened to our food system, from a grassroots perspective, and then work to do something about it.”
