About Us
Lead Artist Latoya Peoples, Artist Assistant Jerome Chester, and Baltimore City Youth.
About Us
Baltimore City
Baltimore is a vibrant city, home to more than 600,000 people who want and need their city to be the best possible place to raise healthy, well-prepared children. Baltimore City is responsible for the education of more than 85,000 students in grades K-12, approximately 10% of all public school students in Maryland. Importantly, Baltimore is also home to scores of community leaders who are committed to their City and eager to be part of a transformational solution that benefits all of our children and young people.
We all want to be able to provide for our families, feel safe in our communities, and give our kids a fair shot.
For too many folks in Baltimore, this is not the current reality. Population decline, loss of jobs and affordable housing, limited opportunity and investment, and increases in crime have prevented our city from thriving.
These challenges disproportionately fall on the shoulders of our young people, especially Black and Brown kids, because of historic and current inequities.
In the fall of 2012, a new discussion began around the idea of working together on behalf of the City’s children. The discussion focused on innovative ways community partners could come together to support children’s health and education from birth through the time when they are college and/or career ready.
What is Baltimore’s Promise?
Baltimore’s Promise is a data-driven collective impact nonprofit that has an audacious vision: all young adults in Baltimore City will have what they need to be healthy, and on a path to achieve economic self-sufficiency. They do this by spurring collective action, disrupting racist systemic barriers, building civic infrastructure, and accelerating positive outcomes for youth. Baltimore’s Promise cares about the wellbeing and opportunities available for all children from birth to career, and focuses on Black, Latinx, and other intersectionalities of youth ages 14-24, who are historically, and currently, discriminated against.
Baltimore’s Promise is fiscally sponsored by the Fund for Educational Excellence. It harnesses the power of data and collaboration to achieve better outcomes for Baltimore’s youth and their families.
We support initiatives with a diverse range of partners to improve outcomes for youth at every age.
We listen to and partner with youth to advocate for and fund programs that support communities that have been underfunded.
We maintain and update data initiatives, like the Youth Data Scorecard, to make data related to health and well-being of children and young people in Baltimore accessible to all.
We conduct and broadly share research to help decision-makers and our community understand what’s working and what needs to be improved to better serve youth in our city.
Today, hundreds of stakeholders — including the school district, higher education institutions, foundations, businesses, nonprofits, community leaders, adult residents, and youth and young adults — are engaged to build a broad basis of support for our commitment to work together to benefit our children. This ongoing engagement is critical to the work of Baltimore’s Promise, a collaborative dedicated to improving outcomes for the City’s youth.
This broad cradle-to-career focus is similar in intent to many collective impact strategies in cities across the United States. Baltimore’s Promise is the local affiliate of StriveTogether, a national, nonprofit network of nearly 70 partnerships like Baltimore’s Promise that are working to improve outcomes for youth and young adults in their communities by bringing together cross-sector partners around a shared community vision.
Our Goals
Baltimore’s Promise has five ambitious goals for the City’s youth as they progress from childhood to adulthood:
Babies are born healthy.
Children enter kindergarten ready to succeed in school.
Children and youth achieve at grade level in school.
Youth graduate high school prepared for the next step without remediation.
Youth earn quality post-secondary credential or receive training and are career ready.
Together, we can realize Baltimore’s enormous promise by creating an environment where youth and communities thrive.
How We Work
Baltimore’s Promise works in partnership with a diverse group of stakeholders to build on the City's progress in key areas related to children and youth, scale community-wide efforts showing promising results, and foster alignment.
Our community-centered approach enables us to work with partners to:
Advance a shared vision for Baltimore’s future with clear and measurable outcomes.
Make program and policy decisions and recommendations that improve outcomes for youth based on data collected and shared as transparently as possible through a racial equity lens.
Learn from the lived experiences of those most represented in or directly impacted by data.
Support existing interventions that improve outcomes for children and youth in Baltimore.
Identify successful strategies from other cities in the U.S. that could be implemented in Baltimore.
Learn more about how we drive transformative change through collective impact
Our Values
Click the resources below to learn more about the values of Baltimore’s Promise.
OUR Accomplishments
Baltimore’s Promise marked our 10th anniversary in 2023, a milestone that would not be possible without a fierce collective commitment to our city and to the young people growing up within it. As an organization, we have come a long way — and have a long way yet to go. Please join us by watching our Video highlighting our dedication to helping Baltimore’s youth thrive. Take time to explore our 10 Year Timeline that captures important moments from each year. Our work will continue to help ensure that all Baltimore City youth will travel a safe, healthy, and successful educational path from cradle to career.