Research tells us that engaging out of school time learning opportunities are a necessary part of a well-rounded childhood. Children spend only a fraction of their hours in school and need nourishing, challenging, and fun activities to fill in the balance. My audacious idea is to map all of the opportunities that currently exist for Baltimore’s young people, and to invite youth to lead the process.
Young people could quantify and map electronically all of the activities, programs, and resources that are available for children and youth, outside of school. With the completed map, youth and their caregivers would know where resources exist and be able to access them. Advocates, policy makers, and youth services providers would know where the gaps in service are so they could work to address them. Involving youth in the process of mapping fosters their engagement with the city in which they live, and will help make sure that the final results are shaped and presented in a way that reflects a youth perspective on what the resources and opportunities are.
A group of YouthWorks students working with Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign will begin work on the Baltimore Opportunity Map (BOM) this summer by mapping at least 500 youth-serving organizations They will do the research by internet and telephone, and they will be out canvassing neighborhoods to capture the opportunities in person. The Mappers will build on Mayor Rawlings-Blake’s new Youth B’More site (www.youthbmore.org), which provides an online catalog of organized youth activities for Summer 2010. As each resource is added to the database, an organizational contact number and email address will be attached, so that over time, these individuals can be contacted for updates, ensuring that the data stays fresh and accurate.
Please look out for the Baltimore Opportunity Mappers and be generous with the information you share. With your help, they will create a comprehensive and accessible map of the resources for youth that exist in our city. Strong community participation is necessary at many levels to ensure success: accurate data about available opportunities is critically important, as is ensuring that youth and caregivers know about and use this resource over time.
Maps show us where we have come from, and they allow us to visualize where we could be going. With a good map, and the skills to use it, anyone can go just about anywhere. Without a map, the road taken is often harder, longer, and less direct. Baltimore’s children deserve a good map, dense with opportunities, to get them safely to their chosen destinations.
You should get in touch with Janet Felsten, who is a former OSI Fellow and does mapping as the founder of the Baltimore Green Map. She has great tools for creating maps. Just did the Druid HIll park map as well.
She’s done mapping with youth at Barclay as well.
I agree with Felicity’s audacious idea that a map should be created and that young people should lead the effort but probably for a different reason than Felicity. I have been involved with producing more directories of resources than I care to count. They are always out of date the moment that they are finished and the information changes rapidly making them even less useful in a short period of time. But the act of creating them does something quite amazing for the creators. It creates people who are interested in, knowledgeable about the sector and more importantly have developed relationships that wear well over time. So go ahead and do it! The people involved will benefit GREATLY and the rest of the young people will benefit a little.
Maintaining such a base of data is time consuming and labor intensive, however vital for your idea to flourish and be relevant in real time. Maps are very cool, technologically relevant and can be a great inspiration. Bravo to your efforts!
Thank you for writing your OSI audacious idea blow. Before reading it, I did not know about http://www.youthbmore.org
I think that many Baltimore families would benefit from knowing about it. Keep up the great work!
Matt
I agree with Dick Cook’s post. In Baltimore, the gaps are many, the resources are few. If you talk to people with the data (and there are many organizations with data including BNIA, UM, JHU, FLBC’s Data Collaborative), the issues and gaps have been well documented. Workgroups, committees, subcommittees, cabinets, task forces (all including youth AND adults) have covered this terrain, created lists, maps, documents and catalogs. Around 1999, the S&S Campaign launched an “Asset Mapping” effort which culminated in a comprehensive (and instantly outdated) map showing that Baltimore’s Youth could access (at the time) over 300 youth serving organizations (someone @ S&S may still have a copy of the map).
I respectfully submit that audacious is equipping youth with GPS-enabled cell phones and/or GPS units to geo-tag “resources”/”assets”, then uploading those points (with video, text, and audio from youth who use the center/location) to google maps. It is still cataloging, but relatively inexpensive, absolutely fun, and totally real time (as Michael D. said).
Welcome to the work, and I wish you fortitude as you move to make it happen.
Thanks to everyone for your comments! We are partnering with Youthline America (www.youthlineamerica.org) to create the map. This online tool has many features that make it well-suited to mapping time-sensitive, moving targets like opportunities. The Mappers are required to collect information for two contacts for every resource. A feature called “greenstat” means that the data is published with its date of publication and an icon of a tree. As time goes by, the resource is contacted to review and update the information right on the website. As the data gets older, if resources are not updated, the trees icons begin to lose their leaves. Users have a visual cue that the data is no longer current, and website administrators can determine which resources need follow-up. Youthline has worked with partners in New Orleans on a Youth Mapping project, and the map-in-progress is visible at http://neworleans.ilivehere.info . The Baltimore Opportunity Map is growing daily, and we are determined to make it a sustainable and useful source of information for local children and youth!