When the Warnock Foundation‘s Olga Maltseva first thought up the Baltimore Social Innovation Journal, she hoped it would be a publication that highlighted “new ways to deal with old problems.”
Included in that goal: highlighting the social entrepreneurs thinking up those new ways. And considering the 13 people chosen to be profiled in the first edition of the journal, that seems to have happened.
There’s Contemporary Museum director Deana Haggag, who’s re-envisioning the museum as a sort of traveling exhibit, instead of a stationary institution people must go to. Chris Wilson, convicted for a homicide as a juvenile, now knocks on doors as the workforce developer for the Greater Homewood Community Corporation conducting informal surveys of the “low-tech” skills people possess to try to find neighbors — some of them former criminals — paying work.
Included in the first 13, all of whom applied themselves for a chance to be profiled and be awarded up to $2,500 in grant money, are at least three social entrepreneurs with ties to the city’s tech community:
- Gretchen LeGrand, the cofounder of nonprofit Code in the Schools, which teaches after-school computer programming classes in Baltimore city public schools.
- Jessica Ladd, a civic hacker whose CodeForSex website and texting service allows people who have taken an STD test to receive their results electronically, saving them a visit to a clinic.
- Carol Ott, the founder of the Baltimore Slumlord Watch blog and the companion Housing Policy Watch program, who advocates for tenants’ rights and an end to vacant housing blight in the city.
As Technical.ly Baltimore reported, the journal is a way to showcase the work of perhaps lesser-known social innovators in the city.
Find all 13 Baltimore Social Innovation Journal innovators here.
Much of the impetus for the journal came from the Speak Up, Baltimore Survey the Warnock Foundation conducted in September 2013, where 632 respondents submitted their ideas for how to make Baltimore city a better place to live and work.
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