Building Community, Still Thirsty for Justice: Supporting Community Development Efforts in Baltimore

Baltimore is a city of many challenges, but it possesses true communitybased strength. The city’s residents and community organizations are its greatest assets. This article highlights some of the community’s work and how the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law (CDC) supports this work through its experiential learning curriculum. The challenges facing Baltimore’s communities (systemic disinvestment, structural racism, vacant buildings, unemployment, and the criminalization of poverty, to name a few) existed long before the national media coverage and uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in Baltimore police custody in April 2015.1 In the days that followed Gray’s death, thousands of Baltimoreans took to the streets to protest state-sanctioned violence in low-income Black neighborhoods across the city. After the Baltimore Uprising,2 and in the spirit of the city’s long history of community organizing, new community-based groups formed and existing organizations created wide-tent coalitions to collectively advance their organizing efforts.3 These groups have fostered public discourse not only about police violence, but also about the economic violence that poses an everyday threat to individual and community safety and security, such as the lack of access to basic human needs—food, water, and housing.

Building Community, Still Thirsty for Justice: Supporting Community Development Efforts in Baltimore

Baltimore is a city of many challenges, but it possesses true communitybased strength. The city’s residents and community organizations are its greatest assets. This article highlights some of the community’s work and how the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law (CDC) supports this work through its experiential learning curriculum. The challenges facing Baltimore’s communities (systemic disinvestment, structural racism, vacant buildings, unemployment, and the criminalization of poverty, to name a few) existed long before the national media coverage and uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in Baltimore police custody in April 2015.1 In the days that followed Gray’s death, thousands of Baltimoreans took to the streets to protest state-sanctioned violence in low-income Black neighborhoods across the city. After the Baltimore Uprising,2 and in the spirit of the city’s long history of community organizing, new community-based groups formed and existing organizations created wide-tent coalitions to collectively advance their organizing efforts.3 These groups have fostered public discourse not only about police violence, but also about the economic violence that poses an everyday threat to individual and community safety and security, such as the lack of access to basic human needs—food, water, and housing.

Perceptions about prenatal care: views of urban vulnerable groups

BACKGROUND: In the United States, infant mortality rates remain more than twice as high for African Americans as compared to other racial groups. Lack of adherence to prenatal care schedules in vulnerable, hard to reach, urban, poor women is associated with high infant mortality, particularly for women who abuse substances, are homeless, or live in communities having high poverty and high infant mortality. This issue is of concern to the women, their partners, and members of their communities. Because they are not part of the system, these womens' views are often not included in other studies. METHODS: This qualitative study used focus groups with four distinct categories of people, to collect observations about prenatal care from various perspectives. The 169 subjects included homeless women; women with current or history of substance abuse; significant others of homeless women; and residents of a community with high infant mortality and poverty indices, and low incidence of adequate prenatal care. A process of coding and recoding using Ethnograph and counting ensured reliability and validity of the process of theme identification. RESULTS: Barriers and motivators to prenatal care were identified in focus groups. Pervasive issues identified were drug lifestyle, negative attitudes of health care providers and staff, and non-inclusion of male partners in the prenatal experience. CONCLUSIONS: Designing prenatal care relevant to vulnerable women in urban communities takes creativity, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity. System changes recommended include increased attention to substance abuse treatment/prenatal care interaction, focus on provider/staff attitudes, and commitment to inclusion of male partners

Solidarity Economy Lawyering

This essay explores lawyering in the solidarity economy movement as an emergent approach to progressive transactional lawyering. The solidarity economy movement is a set of value-driven theories and practices that seeks to transform the global economy into a just economy that centers the needs of people and the planet. While the solidarity economy movement has been established for several decades in other parts of the world, the solidarity economy movement in the United States emerged in 2007. Over the last decade the movement has grown and gained significant momentum, with the rise of solidarity economy organizations and initiatives, as well as the incorporation of solidarity economy strategies in a number of social movements, including the Movement for Black Lives, the Indigenous Rights movement, the modern-day environmental justice movement, and in many workers’ rights campaigns. Despite the growing prominence of solidarity economy initiatives, not much if anything has been written about solidarity economy in the legal body of scholarship. All the while, the law and legal support play an integral role to the success of solidarity economy enterprises and the movement overall. Moreover, many transactional lawyers, law school clinics, and legal service organizations are providing legal and technical assistance to solidarity economy organizations. Solidarity economy is an important framework for progressive transactional lawyers and those interested in supporting transformative community economic development (CED) efforts. The skills and expertise of transactional lawyers have much to contribute to the solidarity economy movement. I argue that transactional lawyers have a particular role to play in the development of the solidarity economy movement, as creative legal strategies are an important piece to the long and short-term success of the solidarity economy movement. These current and potential contributions go beyond the legal structuring of worker cooperatives or community land trusts but fully extend to other transactional legal services and skillsets. Transactional lawyers can play a critical role in 1) advocating for corporate and regulatory reform and creatively reimagining the law to aid the goals of the solidarity economy movement, what others have referred to as radical transactionalism and 2) “scaling up” the solidarity economy through the linkage of solidarity economy organizations and enterprises. To be an effective lawyer in the solidarity economy movement, however, legal professionals must be able to provide more than the necessary technical expertise. Effective solidarity-economy lawyers must also embrace the imaginations and experimentations of clients and put the law in service to those goals. To do so, solidarity-economy lawyers should develop a deep understanding of their clients’ goals, build authentic and solidaristic relationships with their clients, and also creatively integrate legal strategies to client matters