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I tend to check in on my news and social media feeds when I get up in the morning and before going to bed in the evening. Local news is scarce, and national news dominates.
Sometimes it feels like the billionaires who have acquired the technology and media we rely on for information are deliberately seeking to dismantle the foundations of civil society: empathy, faith, community, and cooperation.
But then I go to the office, get briefed on the work of county agencies, and visit with extraordinary people for whom empathy, faith, community, and cooperation are core values and daily practices.
Maybe sharing the good stuff will help you get past the rest.
I spent Saturday morning with 300 alumni and supporters of the former Ralph Bunche School on Mill Swamp Road in South County. Originally, it was a Freedmen’s Bureau School called Mill Swamp. After it burned in 1920, four local Black Churches came together to build a replacement. They later donated it to the county, and the school was expanded and eventually named after the first Black Nobel Peace Prize winner and early United Nations leader, Ralph Bunche. The school closed in 1972.
I first attended the annual Black History Month celebration of the Ralph Bunche community in 2019. I learned how the Ralph J. Bunche Community Center Board, which had a long-term lease with the county, was raising money to repair the roof, fix the furnace, and save the building, and about the food pantry and other community service activities there. I committed to do all that I could to help them achieve their goals for the future of the county-owned site, and asked our team to explore options.
I was told that we’d need to work with the Community Center Board to identify a public purpose to justify investing what it would take to bring the building back to modern standards for public use. It was very gratifying to announce on Saturday that full funding is set aside in our capital budget, and that we are on schedule to break ground later this year.
The facility will be suitable for a much-needed pre-k, have space for displays to tell the history of the school, have a kitchen and community space, and an outdoor pavilion and restored basketball court. History will be told, community will be built, and young children will be prepared for kindergarten. Empathy, faith, community, and cooperation delivered. Much gratitude was expressed.
On Tuesday morning, I met at Arundel Middle School with a group of students who had testified at a budget town hall about the need for sidewalks on Higgins Road, where kids walk to school, cars line up for pickup and drop-off, and buses pass. The students had publicly asked me to visit, and I publicly accepted the invitation.
We drove the streets first, and then sat down with the students in a conference room in grown-up sized comfy chairs. Each child described the nature of the problem, and I provided an update from the Department of Public Works on why the project had been delayed, and an estimate of when construction would start. The students seemed satisfied, and let me know that the sidewalk was only the first phase of the improvements they are seeking. One proudly told me that he’d just been elected 6th grade representative to the student council. Leaders in the making.
Wednesday started with Senator Chris Van Hollen, Senator Angela Alsobrooks, and Congresswoman Sarah Elfreth, first at the YWCA and then at the Nonprofit Center at Crownsville. They came with large posterboard checks from the federal treasury for some things our residents have been asking for.
It was $697,000 for YWCA to house and serve survivors of domestic violence, $133,000 for the Anne Arundel County Food Bank to purchase a refrigerated truck, and $7.65 million for three county projects: $3.5 million for our Joint 911 Call Center, $3.15 million for veterans housing and permanent supportive housing at the abandoned Meyer Building at Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park, and $1 million for our Department of Health’s Gun Violence Intervention Task Force to expand our violence interruption work.
These federal earmarks were the product of cooperation - cooperation grounded in empathy, faith, and community - between members of Congress, local government, nonprofit leaders, and community leaders. It still exists, here in Maryland, because we elected some truly good people.
Later that day, I sat down to record Pittman and Friends Podcast with an extraordinary community leader named Deana Tice. She is President of Anne Arundel County Farm Bureau, vice chair of our County Agriculture Commission and chair of its Ag Education Committee, manager of the 4H livestock barns at the County Fair, and operates three local farms. For me, the conversation was like a visit with my past, but from my seat on the fourth floor of the Arundel Center, it was a glimpse of community strength, of small business heroism, of environmental conservation, of inspiring the next generation, and yes, the core values of empathy, faith, community, and cooperation. Check it out, if you care about food, farming, or the future. It airs next Tuesday.
Until next time…..