It is a treasure to be able to trace the lines of a family tree, to watch a child become a teenager, a teenager become a self-sufficient adult, a self-sufficient adult become a parent with a blooming child of their own.
It’s what stays with Alicia Copeland, director of youth programming at Parks & People, a nonprofit that creates green spaces in Baltimore’s Black Butterfly — majority Black neighborhoods in the eastern and western parts of the city — and puts on environmentally-focused youth programming.
In her more than 20 years with the organization, Copeland has seen children and young adults she’s mentored become teachers, doctors, and even state delegates. And oftentimes she gets to pour her love into their children as well.
“I hope that once they move forward, they take what they’ve learned and do the same thing and they impart it on somebody else,” Copeland said.
Parks & People marked their 40th anniversary last year, celebrating their growth from a support organization to the city’s Recreation and Parks department to a standalone operation with a small but mighty staff, a nine-acre campus in West Baltimore, and a $6 million budget.
The nonprofit organizes summer camps for elementary school students, coordinates paid workforce development opportunities for high schoolers, and hopes to revive a middle school-focused program after shelving their sports league in 2021.
The goal is what CEO Frank Lance refers to as “continuity of care,” supporting children throughout their entire childhood.
“There’s an old colloquialism that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” Lance said. “It’s out of that source of care, that sense of care, that we build these programs.”
While their larger focus is on environmental programming, Parks & People works on improving literacy, emotional regulation, college readiness, and workforce development.
Copeland first got involved with Parks & People as a summer counselor with their SuperKids Camp, a STEAM summer camp program to help elementary school students maintain and grow their knowledge over the summer months, when learning loss is common.
As a middle and high school teacher, she found the change of pace with elementary schoolers to be refreshing. Copeland could see how students were progressing as they got older and it helped her understand why students may be acting or learning in a certain way.
She loved the work, but she didn’t expect to stay this long. People are always surprised that Copeland is still at the same organization after more than two decades.
“I’m just doing my job. I really like my job,” Copeland said. “I don’t know any other job where I would be able to do what I do and the way that I do it and still feel the difference that I’m making.”
The work Parks & People does goes beyond the tangibles of parks and programming, said Kimberly Vasquez, a former participant in the organization’s middle school soccer league and an intern this winter with them.
The work Parks & People does goes beyond the tangibles of parks and programming, said Kimberly Vasquez, a former participant in the organization’s middle school soccer league and an intern this winter with them.
Vasquez, a senior at Goucher College who was part of the student advocacy group SOMOS as a high schooler at Baltimore City College, credits Copeland and her time with Parks & People as a jumping off point for her organizing work.
In middle school, the soccer league connected her with middle schoolers around the city. As a high schooler, Vasquez wanted to foster that connection among immigrant middle schoolers and provide them with resources about the city’s high school application process.
With guidance from Copeland, Vasquez and her classmates coordinated a soccer tournament and resource fair in Patterson Park.
“I knew that soccer created community, despite whatever culture, background, or language that you speak,” she said.
“I learned that through when I was in middle school where I met other middle schoolers who maybe are recent to the country and maybe they don’t know much English… but soccer, it doesn’t require language. You understand even though you might have a different culture.”
On the surface, the mission behind the organization is straightforward: develop green spaces in Baltimore’s Black Butterfly and invest in the city’s youth.
But Lance sees their mission as something deeper.
Baltimore’s history of segregation, redlining, disinvestment, and outright destruction of its Black neighborhoods have left their scars.
“Reparations means to repair, right?” Lance said. “We have created these enclaves of oppressed communities, poor communities, undereducated communities, failing schools, and then we wanna say, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ It’s not that they’re damaged, it’s that your policies have created this and you don’t want to own up to it.”
“We have an opportunity, in our way, to do some repairing. And so we can repair the psyche, if we can repair the hope, if we can repair the dreams, if we can get rid of a building and show you something beautiful instead of blight, we are in a way repairing.”
“For us, we have an opportunity, in our way, to do some repairing. And so we can repair the psyche, if we can repair the hope, if we can repair the dreams, if we can get rid of a building and show you something beautiful instead of blight, we are in a way repairing.”
Frank Lance, CEO of Parks & People
To that end, Parks & People focuses on developing smaller green spaces within neighborhoods in east and west Baltimore so residents have easier access to parks. These often include playground equipment, walking trails, or urban farms. Above all, it’s about bringing assets to residents in a city where they’re often cut off from larger green spaces, said Darius White, director of park projects.
“It’s a space to clear your mind, it’s a place where your kids can play safely, and just having these amenities within your community just creates a well-balanced neighborhood where residents take ownership,” White said.
With Baltimore’s high stock of vacant houses, the organization creates pocket parks by demolishing blighted rowhomes or finding lots where rowhomes have been demolished and building out parks on those lots.
In Upton, the newly opened Harlem Avenue Pocket Park on a formerly vacant lot has created a space for pet owners in the neighborhood to walk their dogs and spend time outdoors with their neighbors.
“It’s just aesthetically pleasing to actually put green spaces around homeowners,” said Wanda Best, executive director of the Upton Planning Committee, one of the neighborhood organizations Parks & People partnered with on this project.
The neighborhood is seeing significant reinvestment in its housing stock and welcoming in new residents. The park provides a place for old and new homeowners to meet.
State delegate Caylin Young, who worked at Parks & People with Copeland as a summer counselor in college, said it’s essential for families in Baltimore to feel like they have places to “play, learn, live, love.”
“I think it’s transformative when we think about public safety, when we think about livability, folks want to be able — and need to be able — to have that access, because we know where there are more green spaces, it has a positive impact on people’s holistic wellness as well,” Young said.
On the 1500 block of McKean Avenue in Sandtown-Winchester, Parks & People transformed a space known for its homicide rate into a gathering space for the community for cookouts and choir competitions.
“In a place where once kids were running for their lives, they’re now running to this community gathering space,” Lance said. They refer to the project as “Miracle on McKean Street.”
Park by park, the organization wants to continue helping revive a strong sense of community in Baltimore’s neighborhoods.
“I’m trained as an architect, so a lot of my career was focused on the actual buildings,” Darius White, the director of park projects, said. “But it’s the space in between buildings that are probably more important.”
“I’m trained as an architect, so a lot of my career was focused on the actual buildings,” White, the director of park projects, said.
“But it’s the space in between buildings that are probably more important.”
The post Nature and Nurture: For more than 40 years, Parks & People has done both appeared first on Baltimore Beat.
