Person of the Month: Kim Trueheart

Kim Trueheart’s gaze drifts past me, landing on the corner of Maine Avenue when I arrive to meet her. Stationed outside of the Liberty Rec & Tech Center, she watches from a motorized wheelchair as two adults hurl heated words at each other. The cacophony is heightened by kids fleeing the adjacent Liberty Elementary School and rushing into the open arms of after school activity.

Joyous shrieks of playground laughter flutter overhead, a troubling contrast against the adults’ exchange of threats. Expressing concern and frustration, along with a handful of choice words,Trueheart beckons me into the building and allows her team of volunteers to mediate the conflict, ensuring that it doesn’t become dangerous for students who will soon enter the rec center. 

Ensuring the daily presence of a protective eye is only a small part of Trueheart’s work as a founding director of the Liberty Village Project. Housed in the Liberty Rec & Tech Center, the volunteer-led non-profit brings local organizations together to serve youth, seniors and families, creating what some have praised as a community schools model. 

The Liberty Rec & Tech Center was constructed in 1977 as a safe space for neighborhood play, exercise and enrichment for all ages. Tucked into Northwest Baltimore’s Forest Park neighborhood just 3 miles north of where Trueheart grew up in Edmondson Village, the Center faced a major threat in 2012 when the Rawlings-Blake administration sought to shut its doors, one of 20 other targeted centers across the city. 

Trueheart, understandably worried about what the neighborhood might lose, used considerable might to protest the closure. After months of confronting the school board to demand that the center stay open, Baltimore City Schools unofficially handed her the keys to the rec center in November of 2012. As the city moved out, Liberty Village Project began to grow up in the building.

Now operating year-round, the Liberty Village Project serves over 500 community members and offers 150 hours of youth programming each year. For at least a mile in any direction, there is no other public, indoor recreational space. By keeping the lights on and the doors open at the Rec & Tech Center, Liberty Village Project meets the needs of a startlingly large patch of neighborhoods underserved by the city’s recreation facilities.

Map of Rec Centers within 1 mile of Liberty Village Project. Via Baltimore City Recreation and Parks Asset Explorer. Accessed March 19, 2025.

As the Liberty Village Project has evolved to offer a wide variety of life affirming programs to children, youth, their families and senior citizens, community members and government agencies alike have stepped up to support Trueheart in keeping the rec center open. She has secured grants from the Baltimore City Department of Planning, Frances-Merrick Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Trust, and the Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund, along with other private donors. Putting some of the heat on local businesses to give back, she also gets pallets of water bottles donated regularly by Carroll Motor Fuel. Right now, a women’s bathroom renovation, including a shower stall, is being funded by Liberty Elementary School. During our tour, she reminds Mike, one of the volunteers, not to lock it until they close at 4pm. “Keep it open, I want to make sure everyone can use it,” she said.

Always true to the mission of the Rec & Tech Center, Trueheart curates programs like the Baltimore Algebra Project, training high school students to tutor elementary school math; a marching band and successful basketball team; a fashion modelling program; a food pantry and mutual aid programs; public showers and restrooms; outdoor pool activities, and more. When the center has additional funding, it is able to offer field trips, photography classes, trauma-informed workshops, and other programs led by paid instructors. 

Trueheart lights up as she talks about sending five of the youth in her programs to participate in a Model UN Summit in the Dominican Republic last year, with help from the rec center’s summer program coordinator Kerrin Massureh. Amongst a group of students from across the Caribbean, Trueheart’s Maryland delegation was the only one from the United States. Students presented on economic disparity within large corporations, analyzing DEI policies and the impact of different business models on low-income communities. With an invitation extended for the Maryland delegation to return in the summer of 2025, Trueheart hopes she can raise enough money to send all of her summer youth instead of being limited to five. 

On February 10th of this year, Trueheart’s birthday, the city delivered its first official lease to the non-profit, granting them legal occupancy of the rec center—without rent or utility payments—for the next 15 years. This news is a relief to Trueheart, who hopes that the lease will allow Liberty Village Project to use state capital grants to replace the building’s broken HVAC system before students have to spend another summer in dangerously hot classrooms.

 Trueheart thanks God for the recent lease, adding “I didn’t need a piece of paper to do the work.” 

Recognized this year by AFRO American Newspapers as one of Baltimore’s most influential people, Trueheart’s reputation is built upon being active on the frontlines of youth advocacy.

“I’m the most active activist around our children…I show up anytime children are on the agenda,” says Trueheart, whose career started off on a much different path. The 68 year-old left her home in Baltimore to join the Navy in 1977. Travelling the world, she didn’t begin to reckon with the guilt of managing advanced weapons development programs until 29 years of service had passed. Trueheart  tells me about sitting in her office in DC, where she abruptly woke up to the violence of the system she had played a major role in. 

“One day I said, I need to go home. Some of the things I had designed and put into operation…I built things that hurt people,”  Trueheart recalls.

Now, she guides people out of harm’s way. Returning to Baltimore City in 2006, she began to learn everything she could about the workings of state and city government. Several years of relationship building later, Trueheart began working with Maryland state representatives like Sen. Jill Carter to introduce and pass bills that addressed the needs of Baltimore’s youth. 

One of her biggest legislative achievements was helping to author HB 771 in 2015. The  measure passed just one month after Freddie Gray’s murder, requiring the Baltimore Police Department to publish annual reporting on hiring, civilian harm, and demographic data.

 “The police were not reporting truthfully what they were doing. So I wrote a [bill]…that outlined 16 items that I want a report on. And it’s law now. They have to write a report annually on the number of African-Americans on the force, the numbers of females on the force. How often are they doing recruiting within the city? How many incidents [with police] caused harm to individuals? When somebody’s hurt, I wanna know that y’all hurt them. How many of those incidents resulted in a hospitalization? It’s transparency that we did not have before,”  Trueheart says.

She also lobbied Annapolis aggressively for Code of Maryland Regulations COMAR 11.06.05. Passed in 2023, it offers free MTA services for public school students and youth workers in Baltimore City’s YouthWorks program. 

Trueheart’s process is straightforward. Using her knowledge of the local legislative process, she speaks directly with lawmakers, administrators and lawyers in Annapolis and Baltimore city halls to testify in support of bills she’s organized. She even campaigned to join Baltimore City Council in 2016. But her work doesn’t stop at city hall.

“I feel it’s my duty to show up, and if necessary, show out,” Trueheart tells me. 

“I show up at the Baltimore development meetings, the school board meetings, the city council meetings, at John’s Hopkins, and at the University of Maryland. I go down to testify, and I bring my folks to testify.” 

Trueheart’s footprint has transformed the landscape of advocacy, upgrading the available toolkit for activists cultivating needed solutions to the long critiqued contrast between the city’s inflating investment in its police department and the declining budget for youth recreation and employment.

Today, Trueheart isn’t ashamed about who she once was, seeing that her impulse to serve has remained consistent over the course of her career. She’s smoothly applied the program management skills she perfected in the Navy to managing programs at Liberty Village Project. 

“That’s why God put me here, to serve. [At first] it was to serve my country, but I’m really getting fulfillment serving my community. It’s a whole different level of service.”

Nearing the end of my tour on the second floor, I wonder quietly about empty garden beds, an empty greenhouse, and a pottery kiln sitting in the vacant art instructors room. 

“Do you have the capacity to grow food here?” I ask. Fuller arts and agriculture programming seems possible, but it looks to me that more volunteers are needed to use all of the resources the Rec & Tech Center has available. Picking up on the scarcity in my question, Trueheart sucks her teeth. 

“Look out that window there, and tell me what kind of capacity you see,” she says.

 Outside, noticing a field of tawny grass that stretches down the block, I feel my thoughts begin to shift. Trueheart is living proof that possibilities go on and on. To make them a reality, you only need to show up.

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