The mission of Civic Works Baltimore Center for Green Careers is to make Baltimore’s economy more equitable and sustainable by training residents for jobs in the emerging green economy. Since 2003, the combination of meaningful employment, a living wage, and marketable trade skills has proven powerfully successful.

Keene Community Garden Connections (CGC) serves to build our local capacity to grow food and address issues of food insecurity related to climate change, personal and communal health, and resiliency. With the help of a private donation from the Rashti Foundation, CGC supports the installation and cooperative maintenance of raised gardens in partnership with local service agencies, students and community members. These funds also support educational outreach to meet the specific gardening interests of community partners.

The Eco-Rep program is an academic class in which students teach other students about sustainability and environmental education. Students gain a basic understanding of all sorts of topics, ranging from waste and recycling, industrial agriculture, climate change, energy, and much more.  They also get an opportunity to interact with and educate their peers about what they've learned by putting on monthly events that seek to change campus behaviors. During the Spring 2013 semester, the Eco-Reps put on "No Impact Week", trying to get the campus community to reduce its carbon footprint, participated in a Divestment campaign from fossil fuels, and will be helping run events at Earth Day. A next step for the program is to move from Eco-Reps simply participating in events to actually proposing, planning, advertising, and implementing a small, impactful project related to sustainability in their residential area or central campus.  This promotes our goal of student empowerment.  We would like to be able to provide a small grant to each of the 6 Eco-Rep classes which meet weekly (10-15 students each) to help them get started.  Some examples might include: implementing dorm-based compost bins, setting up a used item recycling system with Terracycle, implementing a sculpture on campus about wasted plastic water bottles or office paper, etc. We always have a bunch of creative and energetic students each semester who are just itching to do projects like this, but we have been unable to help them thus far.