The Future of Baltimore is Already Here – 7 Ways We Can Harness It

 “When friends in DC ask me what we talk about in Baltimore, I say ‘Baltimore.’”

A friend of mine made this offhand remark last week and it has been spinning in my head ever since. Baltimore’s navel gazing has been seen as a hindrance to some but I’m beginning to think it might be our greatest asset. As I have said before Baltimore was weird before it was cool. That weirdness, that creativity, can be our savior. To save Baltimore, we do not need to look at established models that have worked elsewhere. Let’s be shot of the days of “let’s start a Grand Prix,” “let’s get a Trader Joes,” “let’s attract the next Google.” Let’s stop looking at others and focus instead on pouring resources into creating innovation made for, made by, and made in Baltimore.

Why do I think we need to gaze inward?

1. The solution we want doesn’t exist. I see no industry out there with the potential to employ or train the large population of “unskilled labor” that exists in post-industrial urban cities with living wage jobs.
2. The solution isn’t out there because Baltimore hasn’t created it yet. If Baltimore devoted resources to fostering the talent and creativity in this city, I hold the radical belief that we might actually come up with a solution that not only saves Baltimore, but could change the economic landscape.

Baltimore led the shipping industry because the Baltimore clipper was faster than any other ship around. Baltimore became a center for the milling industry because Oliver Evan’s invented the automatic flour mill. We made leaps as a city because we did things better than other places and that innovation requires out-of-the-box thinking. It was innovation that gave Baltimore the competitive advantage to become the huge industrial center it once was, and it is innovation that could bring us back.

Here’s my idea: let’s assume that everything we want and everything we need is already here and let’s do something amazing with it. Let’s look straight into the navel and ask Baltimorians to get to work saving the city. Here’s my plan Baltimore: let’s scrap all established models and start encouraging the novel, weird and wacky to flourish.

How do we do that? I’m not entirely sure, but here’s my list of places we can start:

1. Create Places Where Crazy Ideas Happen:  We need more places focused on finding funding (via crowdfunding campaigns, microloans, grants) and resources (market research, incubator programs, mentorship opportunities) to help people make their crazy ideas happen. Whether it’s a new way to rent musical instruments or a new model for getting local food to those who are food insecure, I want to see a one-stop shop that works to help people take full advantage of the resources we already have in Baltimore to make it happen. I see a string of neighborhood innovation centers to help people turn their crazy ideas into Baltimore’s latest craze.  
2. Focus on Social Entrepreneurship: Baltimore already has a rich community of people creating socially focused businesses and initiatives. I’m not the only one who sees the potential of Baltimore to lead the way in this new field. Let’s invest in businesses and development models that radically change the social fabric of our city through economic development. Social change should be the focal point of our revitalization, not an afterthought, not a trickle down.  
3. Provide Room for Collaborative Design: In order to form great ideas, you need for people to mix and mingle. We already have some spaces that allow for people to collaborate but they are often buried in silos. We need to create intentional bridges between the silos of innovation we know exist in our community. We need to find spaces that allow people to come together and bounce ideas off each other to form those a-ha! moments that will create our shared future. These could be co-working spaces, public spaces, or a traveling series of events that bring us together to create real solutions for the future.
4. Educate for Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: We need to involve the next generation in the evolution of our community. That means a radical transformation of our education system to encourage and inspire critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and other 21^st century learning skills critical to making our students into tomorrow’s innovators. Whether within or in addition to the school system we need programs that teach students to constantly learn, constantly create, and constantly move our city forward with their entrepreneurial vision.
5. Create Jobs Accessible to Everyone: Andrew Carnegie once boasted he could train anyone to work in a steel mill in a matter of months, a feat once thought impossible by most of the world. We not only need new industries, we need to create processes that make those industries accessible to anyone. Whether it is training programs to get people up to speed or machines that make it easy for everyone to learn and create something great, we need to constantly thinking about making the jobs we create available to more than a trained few.
6. Provide Easy Access to Existing Resources: Baltimore actually has a lot of assets. From vacant homes, to universities, to open data we need to create programs that let the public find, access, and use these assets for their grand schemes.
7. Consider Ourselves the Best, No Questions Asked: Sure Baltimore is always talking about itself, but most of the times we talk about our problems not our solutions. We need to see ourselves as the weird, wacky, center of creativity we are. We need to remember that our city has the potential to reinvent our future and lead the way in transforming the world. We don’t need to be the next Philly, the next D.C., the next New York City because someday people are going to want to be the next Baltimore. We’re just that cool.  

If we all invest in making Baltimore a little weirder, we might create the next ingenious idea that gives us the competitive advantage to once again rise to national (even worldwide) prominence. We could not only be known for the problems exposed in The Wire, but be known for being one of the few cities to take radical measure to address them. We could be known for our creativity, vision, and justice. If we start investing inward we might find that the idea that saves Baltimore was right under our noses all along.