Our Mission & Movement
Updates from May
The Fair Chance Housing Bill was signed into law! This historic bill will make housing access easier for more than 1 million people with a record in Maryland, by making it more difficult for landlords to discriminate against them.
More than 60 BUILD leaders delivered 1,200 postcards at the Baltimore City Council budget hearing in mid-May to show their support for increasing the funding for immigrant mental health and legal services. A smaller group returned for the next meeting this week to keep the momentum going. Our push is to increase the budget for immigrant services to $5M to respond to the stories we (and others) have been hearing.
Our work in Baltimore County is revving up. In early May, we had more than 20 leaders participate in an organizing 101 training, learning about how to do one-on-one meetings, the nuts and bolts of organizing, and more. Our goal is to train at least 200 leaders by the end of the summer.
The BUILD strategy team, staff, and some key leaders took a trip to New York City to see some of the amazing work our sister affiliates, East Brooklyn Congregations, Queens Power, and The Bronx First are doing. EBC took us on a tour of the newest section of the 1000s of low-income Nehemiah Homes that they have been building since the early 1980s. They have truly transformed a vast swath of East New York! Leaders of Queens Power told us the story of their two-year campaign to persuade the governor of New York to allow for the conversion of the largest building in Queens into 2000+ low income housing units (including the part about the governor fleeing from them through a backdoor). Finally, we heard how a small number of Gambian immigrant leaders took the lead in bringing together dozens of mosques and other institutions as part of the founding of the newest IAF affiliate, The Bronx First. It was a wonderful way to learn from other people who are doing similar work as we are here in Baltimore, and share some of our successes as well.
