Race Equity and Inclusion Statement

Baltimore’s Promise is committed to applying a racial equity and inclusion lens to our work. Below is our organization’s Race Equity and Inclusion statement, affirmed by our Board of Directors in May 2017.

Baltimore’s Promise is a citywide collaborative, composed of public, business, community, higher education, nonprofit, and philanthropic leaders who have a shared commitment to an ambitious vision: ensuring that all Baltimore City children and youth are safe, healthy, and well-educated on their paths from cradle to career. We seek to catalyze and align efforts and resources from across our community to make this vision a reality.

Too many Baltimore City children and youth face significant obstacles to achieving their full potential. Opportunity and paths to success are not equitably available to all of our children. Through generations of collective history in our city—confirmed by bodies of research—we know inequities in opportunity and disparities in outcomes are driven by race, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, disabilities, and other societal factors.

In Baltimore, systemic race-based barriers disproportionately affect Black children and youth and those in other communities of color. For Baltimore’s Promise to fulfill our mission of ensuring that all children succeed, we must apply an equity lens that allows us to better understand these barriers and the challenges faced by our vulnerable children, youth and the family supporting their pathway. Acknowledging these entrenched structural impediments, Baltimore’s Promise must commit to long-term strategies that will create opportunity and foster transformative change across Baltimore City.

A rigorous and sustained focus on eliminating systemic and institutional race-based barriers to opportunity is essential to achieving our objectives from cradle to career. Through this intentional approach, we can better shape targeted strategies that meet specific needs of our vulnerable children and youth while improving conditions and outcomes for all populations we serve, creating new pathways for opportunities for children, youth and families to thrive in Baltimore.