Stealing a page, perhaps, from the searing 1993 social study “The Dream and the Nightmare,” which attributed inner-city suffering as much to mind-set as money, multidimensional New Song Urban Ministries Inc. is now in the entrepreneur-development business.
“We have our first economic development partnership going with a resident in the community,” said New Song?s Antoine Bennett, who, along with Patty Prasada-Rao, is the co-executive director of the innovative community-development nonprofit.
A 1988 outreach of Presbyterian New Song Community Church, the nonprofit “holistically” addresses urban blight across housing, education, health care, employment, ex-offender recovery and substance abuse fronts in coordinated programs that stress local empowerment and focus attention on a 15-square-block area of West Baltimore?s 72-square-block Sandtown.
“For the comprehensive health of our neighborhood, we needed some economic growth here,” Prasada-Rao said, explaining that the prospective convenience store, Gary?s Goods, will be sited in a building rehabilitated for $220,000 by New Song and run by Sandtown resident Gary Palmer.
“This is a great opportunity for me and has changed my life,” Palmer said.
The $300,000-a-year, three-employee group coordinates the efforts of the Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, the New Song Community Learning Center, Eden Jobs and New Song?s community health and substance abuse centers. Respectively, they are the nonprofit?s component home building, K-8 quasi-charter school, employment development, and primary health care and recovery nonprofits.
In all, the organization employs about 70 mostly local people and has an annual budget of $5 million. It has rehabilitated 235 houses; graduated about 150 from its learning center; placed 1,300 in jobs, including many ex-offenders; and has treated upward of 6,000 patients a year in its clinic, Prasada-Rao said.
“The one thing that struck me about them was their holistic approach to community development,” said Bert Hash, chief executive officer of Municipal Employees Credit Union, a mortgagor of some 20 Sandtown properties. “Not only were they interested in providing housing to people but also health care and education and jobs.”
