We’re looking back at our highlights of 2025 as we count down to the new year. Celebrate these 12 victories with us!
12. We completed our first permanently affordable home rehabs and welcomed our first homeowner!
11. SBCLT was selected as one of 27 communities across Maryland to launch ENOUGH: Engaging Neighbors, Organizations, Unions, Government, and Households. As the host organization of Brooklyn/Curtis Bay ENOUGH, we are part of a targeted initiative to end childhood poverty in Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. Kayla Smith, our BCB ENOUGH organizer, attended training at the William Julius Wilson Institute and has built a superstar team of community resident leaders who are organized, passionate, and ready to end child poverty!
10. We continued to call for city and state funding for municipal compost and a transition plan away from incineration.
9. SBCLT and our allies hosted a rally to announce new research on the true costs of living in an overburdened community — waste incineration in Baltimore City causes $36.9 million/year (!!!) in health damages. Read the report here.
8. In September, we co-hosted the 11th Annual Environmental Justice and Health Disparities Symposium of the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH), participating in multiple plenary sessions and hosting solidarity tours in South Baltimore for guests from around the world.
7. SBCLT youth from Benjamin Franklin High School created, designed, and launched Toxic Overburden: 100 Years of Environmental Injustice and Resistance, a professional museum exhibit about the policies, practices, and budgets that have made our state and city officials complicit in ongoing environmental violence. The exhibit was the culmination of years of collaboration, research, and documentation with Dr. Nicole Fabricant of Towson University, and was on display at the Peale Museum and Baltimore Unity Hall.
6. We hosted a Day of Service with the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association that brought together volunteers from all across the country and our local communities to clean SBCLT project sites, including beautifying a lot to serve as a food distribution site for Black Yield Institute.
5. Our Mural Arts training program was a 10-week paid internship for local high school students to learn about community engagement, collaborative design, technical preparation processes of mural creation, and financial literacy.
4. SBCLT staff and board traveled to Puerto Rico to share stories of resilience and learn from the inspiring environmental justice leaders of Casa Pueblo in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico. Thank you to our former and forever intern Annalisa Jenkins for uniting our groups in solidarity, and a huge thank you to Princeton University and Goldman Environmental Prize for supporting our trip!
3. We became one of 16 community organizations in Baltimore City to receive investment from the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative (BVRI). This program unlocks access to redevelopment construction loan financing to address vacancies around our South Baltimore development clusters, and will help us move forward in our mission of creating permanently affordable housing and development without displacement!
2. We broke ground on our new community hub! The South Baltimore Environmental Justice Center will be a space where citizen science research can take place, where community organizations can gather, and where residents can turn for support and information about the environmental burdens we face. We’re making progress on the renovation, and we’re starting the new year with a new look thanks to our community mural project with artist kolpeace!
1. We were surrounded by a generous, thoughtful, passionate, and visionary community of donors, sustainers, grantors, and volunteers. Because of YOU, we pushed through a challenging year and are able to look toward 2026 with an abundance of blessing and hope.
We can’t wait to see you at our MLK Day of Service on Saturday, January 17, 2026 or at our first-ever fundraiser event, Harvest of Hope, on Saturday, April 18, 2026!
