My Baltimore's Next: Beth Falcone

Among Charm City's many attributes, it is a nonprofit Mecca. Baltimore's largest employers, most innovative charter schools and creative performing arts groups are among the over 500 nonprofit organizations headquartered here helping to drive our region's growth. I believe that our city's ongoing success depends on a vibrant nonprofit sector creating much needed jobs and delivering innovative programs and services. From established nonprofits like the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra launching new programs like OrKids to start-ups like Civic Work's Real Food Farm, a job training and food program. With government funding for social challenges, the arts, and education shrinking, the nonprofit sector has been picking up the slack and creating solutions for Baltimore's most complex issues.

As Baltimore continues to transform from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one, we must continue to attract an educated base of young people with skills suited for the knowledge-based future rather than the manufacturing-based past. Our innovative nonprofits attract such residents to Baltimore. While eight out of the city's top ten employers are nonprofits, newer groups are attracting young visionaries and thought leaders that are committed to city life. For example, each year Teach for America brings over 300 new corps members to Charm City to teach in some of the city's toughest schools, many of whom end up settling here permanently. For Baltimore to continue to move forward, I believe our nonprofit sector must fuel job growth and job training while attracting passionate new city residents.  

Given the unsustainable federal debt level, government support for all sorts of programs will continue to dwindle while the needs they address will stubbornly persist. Baltimore's nonprofit community has filled the void, offering programs which run the gamut from serving additional meals to the hungry, to providing access to medical care, to funding arts programs in our schools. In addition, they create a marketplace of ideas and debate which proposes new ways to address these issues.

Baltimore needs the nonprofit sector and the passionate corps of both volunteers and employees that come with it to help create a vibrant city where people want to work and play. Let's make it as cool to work for nonprofits as it is to work in the private sector.


Beth Falcone is co-founder of social startup GiveCorps. She lives in Roland Park with her husband and two sons.


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Photos by Arianne Teeple