"This is the stepping stone I need to further my career. … I know it’s going to be useful in my next steps.”

—Davon Person, 24, CBDS+ student who hopes to start his own business

“To have multiple families within a community experience that same type of increase puts the community, and the city, in a better position,” says Ashley K.G. Johnson, administrator of the CBDS+ program. “Instead of hoping that resources and information trickle down to those who need it most, we’re optimizing the talent, resilience, and drive of our city’s youth and working to create a stronger foundation for Baltimore.”

The program would also bring much-needed diversity to the tech industry, says Leek. “Tech affects all of our lives in so many ways, from social media platforms to how government services are delivered,” he says. “It’s important that everyone gets a seat at that table. Meanwhile, it’s hard for someone from East Baltimore to get to a tech job. If we were [in] San Francisco or New York, it would be easy to take public transportation to a tech job, but that’s not the case in Baltimore. We decided to bring the tech jobs to the community.”

Leek decided to start small and slowly scale the program. He partnered with the YO (Youth Opportunity) Baltimore program of the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition (HEBCAC), a decades-old nonprofit serving the area near the East Baltimore campus. The first CBDS+ cohort had just two students—Lewis and one other—who started the coursework in the summer of 2018.

Solving Problems, Moving Forward

The students receive a Chromebook, a lightweight and inexpensive laptop. They save their work to the cloud, enabling them to bypass the limits of the laptop’s memory. They work through most of their courses on their own, then meet in a conference room above Problem Forward twice a week with their tutors. If students don’t have internet access at home, the program will cover the cost of it. They can also work from the Starbucks in the building where Problem Forward is located, a public library, or any place with Wi-Fi.

Leek is in the process of creating a study to follow program participants over the next five years, looking at their incomes, health, and educational choices in order to see which aspects of the program are most effective.

Johnson, a longtime Biostatistics Department employee, jumped at the opportunity to become the CBDS+ program administrator last fall. “I’m a Baltimore native and a graduate of Baltimore City Public Schools, which is part of why I love the program,” she says.

Johnson serves as an adviser, advocate, and surrogate big sister to the students, guiding them through all aspects of the program. On a recent afternoon, she and Hadavand, CBDS+ curriculum lead, walked the third cohort of students through the process of using Google documents and spreadsheets.

The four students were in the second week of the program and had already completed several course modules on their own time. “They practice on their own, and then they come here to polish and perfect,” said Hadavand.

Johnson explained to the students how to create data headers that would make it easier to organize and search. “Make sure you give your sheet a name,” she told the class, bending over the laptop of one student seeking help.

For scholars who attended crowded urban schools, the personal attention is unlike anything they have experienced. Aure’on Allen, 20, applied for the program on the recommendation of her YO employment advocate and quickly discovered she has an aptitude for data science.

“I was always interested in technology, but I didn’t really know what data science was,” says Allen. She had been racing through the modules and was already several lessons ahead of her colleagues. Ultimately, Allen hopes to go to college and graduate school for embryology. In the meantime, a job in data science could help her provide for her two children.