People stand outside the burned community center and apartments across the street from the Southern Baptist Church in Baltimore on Tuesday, a day after riots across the city. Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The violent riots that broke out in Baltimore following the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who is suspected of having been a victim of police brutality, ended with fires, looting and destruction that affected many of the city’s homes and businesses.
1. Finance education
The Baltimore Community Foundation, which invests in education, and race equity and inclusion, has established a Fund for Rebuilding Baltimore and is working with the community to determine how best to apply the donations. 100 percent of donations will go to rebuilding efforts.
Click here to donate.
2. Volunteer
If you live in the area and can volunteer your time, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods has created a Google doc listing places around the city that could use a few extra hands, whether it be for cleanup, delivering supplies or organizing peaceful walks around the city.
Click here to help.
In what will be a first for Major League Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles will host the Chicago White Sox on Wednesday in a stadium closed to fans as Baltimore copes with some of the worst U.S. urban rioting in years. Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
3. Give to Camden Yard employees
Bill Baer, a Philadelphia sports writer, created a fund for employees of Baltimore’s baseball stadium who will be missing out on up to a week’s worth of pay, after two games were canceled, one was closed to the public and three have been relocated.
Click here to donate.
4. Help rebuild a senior center
A fund has been set up to rebuild a $16 million community center that was burned to the ground on Monday. The center was expected to house 60 low-income senior citizens and was pioneered by the Southern Baptist Church in Baltimore.
Click here to donate and specify that the donation should go to the Mary Harvin Transformation Center.
5. Invest in Baltimore’s youth
Founded in 2012, The Inner City Harbor Project is staffed and run by youth leaders from Baltimore who help train police officers on ways to better communicate and engage with young people. The program also mediates conflicts between teenagers and sends 25 “teenage ambassadors” to the Inner Harbor on the weekends and after school during the summer to promote positive behavior.
“What I see in the Inner Harbor and what was being expressed is the feeling of being discriminated, excluded from mainstream society and retaliating in the only way they know how,” Celia Neustadt, the executive director of Inner City Harbor Poject, who founded it in the summer of 2012, told NewsHour.
“These kids don’t have anything to lose. They are not engaged academically; they are not engaged in traditional social structures,” she said. “They have created their own independent structures to support the things they care about, but they don’t have anything to lose in our current mainstream society because we haven’t created space for them,” she said.
Neustadt believes the teenagers need to be a part of finding a solution to the youth violence in Baltimore. “Without the teens on the inside, we have no hope for knowing it, understanding it, or working to resolve it,” she said.
Click here to donate.
The post 5 ways you can help Baltimore appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
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