Editor’s Note: The author volunteers as a delivery driver with Tubman House, and his sister serves on the board.
Maryland is one of the wealthiest states and has the second-highest concentration of millionaires in the country. Yet hunger continues to be an enduring problem; according to the Maryland Food Bank, one in three Marylanders is at risk of going hungry every year.
Research shows that hunger has devastating impacts on the physical and mental health of individuals and entire communities. And these impacts are disproportionately felt in Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods.
Residents of the Black Butterfly, majority-Black neighborhoods with a long legacy of hypersegregation, disinvestment and over policing, are twice as likely to experience food insecurity compared to the overall population. One in four city residents live in food deserts where there are no grocery stores or other sources of fresh, healthy food within half a mile.
After decades of brutal cuts to the social safety net along with grocery chains and developers abandoning under-resourced neighborhoods, nonprofits, religious organizations, and volunteer-run organizations have often stepped up to fill the gap in resources.
Tubman House in Sandtown-Winchester is one of them. Since 2020, the volunteer-run mutual aid collective has fought hunger by delivering bags of groceries to dozens of families in West Baltimore nearly every Sunday for free. But in mid-June, the group was forced to halt operations after the food rescue group that provided them groceries and a warehouse space lost funding and was unable to continue operating.
Since 2020, the volunteer-run mutual aid collective has fought hunger by delivering bags of groceries to dozens of families in West Baltimore nearly every Sunday for free.
Now, Tubman House is urgently searching for ways to continue and expand their food delivery service, as well as their goal of providing the community with resources they need to exercise self-determination.
“It’s a great loss because a lot of people depend on it,” said Sister Brenda Ames, a resident of Northwest Baltimore who both receives food from and volunteers for Tubman House.
“Even for someone like myself, who is working now, groceries are expensive,” she said.
The cost of food has increased almost 25% since 2020, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Many of the 68 families served by Tubman House are low-income, elderly, lack access to cars, and otherwise face mobility issues that make navigating the city’s notoriously unreliable public transportation particularly challenging.
“These are individuals who would have difficulty accessing fresh food even if it were nearby,” said Durre Bell, vice president of Tubman House.
Up until June, Tubman House obtained groceries from Baltimore Community Food, a local nonprofit that rescues millions of pounds of food annually from corporations to give away for free through curbside pickup. BCF was forced to suspend its work after its funders failed to renew $300,000 in grants that covered the majority of operating costs.
BCF founder J.C. Faulk says they will have to end their operations, which he estimates gave away 300,000 pounds of food a month, if they are unable to quickly raise the necessary funds.
“Tubman House feeds 68 families every week, and that amazing work will stop if it goes away,” said Faulk, who is seeking bridge funds to continue BCF’s work.
Since 2021, Baltimore has allocated $26.7 million from American Rescue Plan Act funding to local nonprofits and government agencies for food provision to under-resourced communities, distributing thousands of meals to city residents.
Yet significant needs persist; a survey published in December 2023 by Johns Hopkins researchers found that half of Black respondents experienced food insecurity compared to 15% of white respondents.
Tubman House, which was launched in 2016, primarily operated as a community garden at first. In 2020, organizers pivoted to a food delivery model in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic caused food insecurity to skyrocket, especially in communities like Sandtown-Winchester.
Tubman House’s eight core organizers source groceries including fresh fruits and vegetables, canned goods, and household supplies.
Working with volunteers, they sort, divide, and bag these items. The organizers then coordinate with a team of volunteer drivers, assigning each driver a route and a list of families for delivery.
Before pivoting to delivery, Tubman House was feeding dozens of families around Gilmor Homes, holding annual haunted houses for Halloween, and putting on summer programs for local youth.
Many of the families receiving grocery deliveries now have long-standing connections and relationships with Tubman House.
“It is really important to build systems and build communities that don’t rely on profit and don’t rely on harm,“ said Zoe Brown, director of volunteer coordination for Tubman House.
The group is inspired by their legendary abolitionist namesake, Harriet Tubman, and the organization’s co-founder Eddie Conway, a former Black Panther who passed away in 2023.
In the 1960s, when Conway was a leader with the Baltimore Chapter of the Panthers, their free breakfast program fed thousands of poor Black children across the nation whose hunger made it difficult for them to learn.
“He was dedicated to making Baltimore a better place for oppressed people, especially Black folks,” Kevin James, the president of Tubman House, said of Conway.
A recent local exhibit showcased the impact the Blank Panthers had on Baltimore, from helping communities meet their basic needs such as food, housing, jobs, and education to protesting police brutality and the racist status quo. It also shed light on the secret campaign by federal and local authorities to surveil, infiltrate, and discredit the party’s work.
Yet their legacy lives on decades later; the federally funded free breakfast and lunch program, which was modeled off the Panthers’ work, serves over 30 million children across the U.S. every year.
“[Conway] would always say, ‘solidarity, not charity,’” said Bell. “Organizing is important. But, even before organizing, people need their basic needs met. It’s hard for a hungry person to think of anything further than their hunger.”
In 1970, Conway was convicted for the killing of a police officer and spent the next 44 years in prison. He steadfastly maintained his innocence and supporters argued he was denied a fair trial and was framed as part of the government’s efforts to destroy the Black Panthers. He continued organizing even behind bars.
Conway won his freedom in 2015, the same year 25-year-old Freddie Gray was arrested by police and sustained injuries in custody that resulted in his death.
The resulting calls for justice cast a light on the deep legacy of injustice in neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester.
Government policies excluded majority Black neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester from the kind of economic development that has fueled upward mobility in predominantly white neighborhoods in Baltimore. The investments it did receive have been in the form of policing and incarceration.
“Why is there no longer a grocery store in Sandtown, and why is it that this is the ZIP code with the highest arrest rate? Why are these things happening?” said James.
“It’s not a coincidence, it’s by design.”
A 2024 Prison Policy Institute report found that Sandtown-Winchester has among the highest arrest and incarceration rates in the city.
Residents of Sandtown-Winchester have the city’s lowest median income at $26,690, and one of the highest levels of lead exposure in the city; even small levels can lead to lifelong disabilities. The report also noted that, for decades, the city has omitted Sandtown-Winchester from its development plan and that 30% of homes in the neighborhood are vacant, the highest rates in the city.
“When [Conway] got out, he was like, ‘Baltimore looks 10 to 100 times worse’ than it did before he went in,” said James.
The following year, Conway and longtime community organizer Dominque Conway launched Tubman House with the goal of feeding the hungry, building political consciousness, and empowering the local community devastated by decades of disinvestment.
One of Tubman House’s first acts was to take over a vacant home in Sandtown-Winchester a short distance from where Gray was arrested, transforming it into a hub for community outreach.
“Tubman House is about self-determination. First, we can support each other in a concrete, tangible way on a small scale. Then we can scale up from that to recognize that we’re the people that we’ve been waiting for,” James said.
“Tubman House is about self-determination. First, we can support each other in a concrete, tangible way on a small scale. Then we can scale up from that to recognize that we’re the people that we’ve been waiting for,”
Kevin James, president of tubman house
Soon, the group had taken over adjacent plots of vacant land to create a community garden, working with local youth to grow fresh fruits and vegetables to provide to their families.
“One of the things that Eddie was very clear about is that people have the power to effect change when they work with each other,” said James.
Tubman House has remained steadfast in their commitment to provide for the community, despite setbacks. They successfully obtained groceries from BCF for their weekly delivery on June 30, but not on July 7.
The organization is actively seeking new sources of groceries to distribute while working to build the capacity needed to meet the growing demand for their services. Currently, they reach roughly half of the families requesting deliveries, with 64 more on their waitlist.
”We want to have the capacity to grow into something that is more deeply justice-related and less fighting for simply mutual aid and survival,” said Brown.
This story is dedicated to Sophie Fitzsimmons-Peters, a loving friend, neighbor, and community member.
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