‘We need to attract bright young people to Baltimore’: Robert Embry

Since August 2013, seven college graduates have been working at startup companies in Baltimore city as fellows with national nonprofit Venture for America.
Now in its third year, Venture for America places recent college graduates in jobs with startups in a handful of cities in the U.S. Startups screen and select program applicants to work with them for two years at a salary of $38,000. Supporting the first year of Venture for America fellows in Baltimore is the Mount Vernon-based Abell Foundation, which gave the nonprofit a grant of $150,000.
As the Baltimore Sun reports, Abell Foundation president Robert Embry thinks the program is worth the foundation’s financial backing:

The Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, which helped bring Teach for America to the city in 1992 and is now supporting Venture for America with a $150,000 grant, sees the new effort as economic development.
“We need to attract bright young people to Baltimore,” said Robert C. Embry Jr., Abell’s president. “And secondly … Baltimore’s future lies in innovation. So this serves both purposes. It “brings talented people to Baltimore and hooks them up with startup companies.”

Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun.