YRP hires manager to lead expanded effort
Ali Duggan, right, has been meeting one-on-one with community leaders like Bonita Cody.
Allison Duggan, newly hired as the community organizing manager for the York Road Partnership, has been spending her first few weeks on the job in listening mode–meeting individually with local residents to learn more about their stories and their aspirations for the community.
Already she has identified opportunities to move on with the next phase of her work. She describes this step as focusing on the “people, ideas, places that are slipping through the cracks” and finding ways to make sure they are no longer overlooked.
Some of this work is straightforward, like making sure that residents are directed to neighborhood resources such as GEDCO for food and health care assistance. But other situations have been far more challenging, like how to help an adolescent male and his family living in an abandoned house.
Duggan is new to YRP, but she has plenty of local history going for her. A native of Mid-Govans, she has fond memories of growing up in the house where her parents still live.
“As I’ve been having more conversations with people, I realized how lucky I was as a child,” she says, noting all the local landmarks she used to frequent, from St. Mary’s Church across the street to the Senator Theatre and Lynne Brick’s fitness center. Because she had sisters who worked at the latter two places, she often had a chance to hang out and get an inside view.
While her sister was selling movie tickets at the Senator, Duggan would be sitting in the corner of the booth, doing her homework. “Then I’d get an orange soda and a popcorn and get to watch a movie. It could be the same movie over and over again. It didn’t matter that I knew all the scenes,” she says. “But then there would be these really big premieres, and I remember the special seating, I call them skyboxes, upstairs. And to be a part of all that, it was so magical.”
One of Duggan’s job duties is marketing the community, especially the seven areas that are part of the Healthy Neighborhoods Inc. Program: Kenilworth Park, Mid-Govans, Radnor-Winston, Richnor Springs, Wilson Park, Winston-Govans and Woodbourne-McCabe.
It’s an easy pitch for her to make, as she recently experienced at the City Living Fair sponsored in May by Live Baltimore. “It was a nice opportunity to really let the area shine, because it is a true gem,” she says.
She has been promoting York Road for years to friends who were looking to buy a house. “I tell them, ‘You really need to look in the area I grew up in, because there’s so many houses, and they’re huge and they’re not expensive,’” she says.
“If you want to really invest, that’s the area to do it, because they’re so beautiful.”
Duggan holds degrees from Bennington College and the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she currently teaches in the community arts/MFA program. She comes to YRP from Fusion Partnerships, where she served as director of community grants and directed more than $420,000 into East Baltimore neighborhoods through 157 grant awards.
“Work From Home- The Students (Poor Babies)” is from Duggan’s COVID Series.
“She has incredible experience working with communities in East Baltimore,” says YRP President Dan Pontious. “Having Allison here will help people work together on common interests to build power and make change.”
Her initial efforts are aimed at “learning what people are really interested in, what they’re motivated by,” he says. “As we better understand what kinds of interests people have across neighborhoods, Ali will be the glue in the efforts of community leaders to work together to improve the corridor.”
YRP recently joined BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development), and Duggan will be helping to adopt BUILD’s organizing strategies for neighborhood priorities.
Pontious says a key part of her job will be helping to identify the next generation of leaders to help the area through YRP efforts in housing and neighborhood revitalization, youth development, public spaces and greening, and public safety.
With her arts background, Duggan will also play an important role in “block projects” that YRP is planning. These can take different forms, Pontius says, but are intended to help build community and market individual blocks by, for example, installing distinctive lighting or signage.
In addition to teaching and community organizing, Duggan continues with her own artistic pursuits. “Right now, I’m doing mostly marker drawings,” she says, noting how she was prompted to pass the time during COVID-era Zoom meetings. “I was sitting there in the beginning and started doodling, and it reminded me of being a kid in school, and then that’s what kind of let me go from there.”
One current focus is “a series now about leadership, black leadership, using the symbolism of chairs.”
As she has been speaking with residents, one of the things that has struck Duggan is the sense of rootedness.
“I am learning that there’s a lot of legacy families here,” she says. “There are people that have lived in the area for a long time, with deep family connections that go back generations. You have neighbors who support one another and understand what’s going on. And that’s really nice.”
At the same time, she notes that York Road itself remains a strong line of demarcation. “It is a very segregated line in the city,” she says. Outsiders coming to the neighborhood can be “shocked” if they pass through Homeland or Guilford and then arrive at York Road, she says.
Her hope is that York Road can evolve so that “instead of being a segregated line, it can be a force of joining.”
She is encouraged that this could happen by what she is hearing in one-on-one conversations.
“A lot of people are wanting to be able to walk around, do a little shopping, enjoy places to sit, a little greenery, gathering spaces for people in the neighborhood,” she says. “That seems to be an emerging vision. Who wouldn’t want that?”