This work is the latest result of a collaboration between cultural and community organizers working in West Baltimore’s Penn-North community, and the Imaging Research Center faculty, staff, and students that has been sustained for ten years. The IRC’s interest in grounding the research of the IRC in the lives of the people of Baltimore’s communities, and in centering culture in the IRC’s approach to using new forms of media to meet public challenges. The collaboration has produced numerous experimental media projects to make the complexity and richness to be found in the West Baltimore community seen and heard in new ways.

In 2020, public economists Gladstone (Fluney) Hutchinson and Donald Harris (father of Kamala Harris), began to work with organizers Denise Griffin, John Harris (no relation to Donald), and others connected with the Arch Community Network at Baltimore’s historic Arch Social Club on a new kind of plan for community economic development in West Baltimore. Hutchinson and Harris had been successful work in other countries, and in the coal towns of Kentucky here in the US, working with communities to imagine economic development as the end product of a process of nurturing culture, strengthening and expanding networks, developing social capital, and establishing entrepreneurship so that the community owns and controls what it makes and does rather than allowing those from outside the community, who may have ulterior motives, to shape and control their development.

Gladstone, an associate professor of economics and policy studies at Lafayette College and founder of the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project (EEGLP) contextualized the project saying “West Baltimore is going through the reimagining process about what its arts and cultural environment means for the Black community today.” In a project document entitled Empowering a Renaissance in West Baltimore, project authors state that “Particular focus will be given to awakening West Baltimore latent assets, including cultural and creative ones, and the community’s deeper and more meaningful engagement with the value and wealth-building dimensions of entrepreneurial capitalism.” Hutchinson believes that to thrive, communities in which he has worked, from Appalachia, to Honduras, Jamaica, and New Orleans must build capacity upon the assets they find within their communities, and thus own what they build,  And to do that, the development plan Hutchinson and Harris have developed begins with lifting up and amplifying community history and culture as the basis of establishing networks of trust capital which are necessary to build the social capital needed for business and other economic development efforts.

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