class 6 – UB Visions

My Leadershape Vision – Home – Sonce

By: Sonce Reese, Class 6

With over 16,000 vacant houses in Baltimore City, the city has a unique opportunity to make it possible for many college students, individuals and families to have a place to call home.

Heritage Crossing5 — http://baltimorefuture.blogspot.com/2014_10_01_archive.html

Purchasing, owning and rehabbing a vacant home is a great way for the city to bring families back to the city, and to create affordable housing opportunities for individuals and college students. Homeownership in the city provides the owner with the opportunity to create their own space, to work towards becoming debt free and to be a part of building a healthy, vibrant community.

There are many programs that make it possible to own a home in the city and create housing opportunities. Baltimore City’s Vacants to Value program offers many incentives for Baltimore City Ownership including the faceted Baltimore Homeownership Incentive Program (B-HiP). The highlights of the program include:

The Vacants to Value Booster Program – Eligible homebuyers can get $10,000 towards closing costs for the purchase of a formerly vacant home.

Baltimore City Employee Homeownership Program – The incentive for City employees has been increased from $3,000 to $5,000.

Buying into Baltimore and City Living Starts Here – The Buying into Baltimore incentive has been increased from $4,000 to $5,000. Also, Live Baltimore has added four neighborhood tours, City Living Starts Here, to the previous two citywide tours. The number of incentives awarded has been increased from 60 to 100 per year.

Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Homeownership Assistance Program – For first-time home buyers with total family income at or below 80% of the area median income, $5,000 in down payment and closing cost assistance is available.

You’ll find the website for the program here.

There are also many talented real estate agents in the city who can help to make Baltimore City homeownership a reality.

vacantsmap — http://technical.ly/baltimore/2012/08/09/15928-vacant-buildings-baltimore-city-map/

Access-Land-Photo-1024x323 — http://www.farmalliancebaltimore.org/the-alliance/how-to/access-land/

http://www.vacantstovalue.org/Incentives.aspx#lnyw

What is privilege?

By: Amber Khan, Class 6

Privilege is something that is always around us, but may make us feel uncomfortable. However, if someone calls for you to check your privilege, and you are getting offended, you may not have the right idea about what privilege is.

As apart of my spring project for Leadershape, I decided that I would dedicate a topic once a month to make a video with. The topic for this month is exactly that – Privilege!

Just because you are privileged does not mean you are a bad person, and believe it or not – every single one of us is privileged. Every human in this world is privileged. Just having the wifi, means of connecting to this page to read this means you have privilege. Let alone having the ability to see and read — these are all privileges.

Here some things that does not equate to being privileged: being a bad person, having everything handed to you on a silver platter, that you don’t work for what you have, being one without struggle, not being a hard worker, an asshole.

Obtaining privilege is not about you asking for something and receiving it, but rather the way life has worked out, you was given these benefits that you didn’t necessary ask to be given or not to be given. We have to recognize that we benefit from these privileges and that I as a human being should act as a mender between the gap between those who are the ones affected by it. This is because every human deserves a right that another human being has obtained simply from existing and how life has played out for them.

Now you may think: but I don’t FEEL privileged? but just because you are privileged does not mean you haven’t felt or experienced oppression in different ways. Privilege and oppression can come in more form than one. Being told you have privilege gives you an advantage in achieving things and that can be surprising, annoying, and frustrating because it sounds like it’s putting down one’s struggles and it actually goes against everything we’ve been taught. We have not been taught to identify and understand our privileges. Privilege is about individuals being terrible people and thats why it’s happened, it’s more-so about an entire system that favors some groups while putting others down.

Talking about privilege isn’t supposed to be comfortable. Feeling the discomfort is what can help you aware yourself of the inequality and realize it in situations when you’re supporting it. Every human has an identity that benefits them in some way from the exploitation of another group, so not wanting to accept your privilege helps keep oppression in place.

Educate yourself on what privilege, or access you have. and do your thang as a earthling and make it happen.

Check your privilege through this activity that we did at the Leadershape Spring retreat, linked below!

http://www.differencematters.info/uploads/pdf/privilege-beads-exercise.pdf

My Leadershape Vision – Building from the Inside Out – Sonce

By: Sonce Reese, Class 6

Healthy, vibrant communities begin from the ground up and from the inside out. Oftentimes, because the problems are so prominent and so widespread, we forget about solutions. Solutions can be large or they can be small, the size of the solutions do not matter. What does matter are the actions that we take. Actions are the difference between change and stagnation. My vision is to create healthy, vibrant communities. Will you join me as I help to make a difference and rebuild our Baltimore.

Moving Forward With My LeaderShape Vision – Sonce

By: Sonce Reese, Class 6

This semester marks the beginning of a new year with new challenges. One challenge that I may face is continuing to move forward with my vision.

After spending almost a month in Antigua, Guatemala and looking around at the most magnificent architecture I’ve ever seen, I realized that it was time to start focusing on solutions. We know what the problems are, we see vacant houses everyday, but what are the solutions to the problem.

So this semester I am focusing on solutions. My solutions will include and my focus will be building healthy, vibrant communities and neighborhoods where:

the residents feel safe.
children can go outside and play.
affordable housing is well kept.
schools and school programs are properly funded.
fresh fruit markets are within walking distance.
the streets are paved.
the transportation system is efficient and transports people to jobs that pay a livable wage.

I’ll keep you posted and in the meantime, come and check out my presentation at the University of Baltimore’s 2nd Annual Experiential Learning Showcase this Thursday, February 11, 2016 in the Bogomolny Room of the Student Center at 11:15 am. Hope to see you there.

My Vision: One Love

By: Amber Khan, Class 6

Hello!

My name is Amber Khan, I’m a super antsy person who loves people and cats. I’m also a business student at UB, specializing in entrepreneurship.

I was recommended by my friend to join leadershape as she explained it to be a life-changing experience, I didn’t actually understand until it was the last day of this 6-day retreat, and I was bawling tears into the shoulders of my family cluster members(Shout out to BAWS NERDS!), and fellow leadershapers. They were all apart of the intense and eye opening week.

Fellow leadershapers worked on mentorship programs, abandoned houses in baltimore, food desserts, environmental issues, all such passionate members all wanting to create a better community for something bigger than themselves.

As I got to focusing on my vision I realized that everything I wanted to do could be achieved in what I already had access to. My skill: video-making. I’ve been doing it since I was thirteen years old, practicing on clips that I would record, helping and following my older brother around while being behind camera. Later, I started getting in front of the camera and making fun videos in my free time.

Eventually I decided to create Youtube videos where I would post about random topics without a schedule, just getting them done when I could.

Upon realizing that my focus for leadershape would be talking about community issues, shedding light on areas where ignorance may linger, and genuinely answering questions that people may have, I decided to combine this into my video-making.

Luckily when I realized that this is what I would wanna do, I went ahead and made my first vision video that happened to during the time of Ramadan, so I ended up making a video answering questions that I had gotten about many of misconceptions about Ramadan and Fasting during this month, so I made my “What Is Ramadan?” video linked below.

Soon after I realized that there was a politician leading a group of people in the country with a twisted agenda, I had to address this.
My video called “I’M AMERICAN” is made addressing some of the thoughts and comments I found to be faulty. The link is below.

My third video in the leadershape series is my newest. This addressed the issue of me being bullied my whole life, and luckily I’m friends with one of the people that happened to bully me throughout my 7-12 grade years in school. I felt like it was more beneficial to have both perspectives from not only the person who got bullied but the person bullying as well. Not just to hear what one was going through but to see two sides of the story. This is also linked below.

Overall, I’m glad that my vision of slowly breaking down barriers and seeing issues topics from a different light started coming to life. I’m excited to continue this series for as long as I can, and ultimately incorporate this vision of mine in whatever else I accomplish in the video making world.

My Leadershape Vision – Sonce

By: Sonce Reese, Class 6

Hello. My name is Sonce Reese. I am a graduate student studying Global Affairs and Human Security and the Graduate Assistant for the Divided Baltimore Dual Enrollment course at the University of Baltimore.

When I moved to Baltimore City three years ago, I saw many vacant homes in the city and people experiencing homelessness and wondered why we couldn’t use these vacant homes to create housing opportunities for the people who really needed them (in Baltimore City there are approximately 16,000 vacant homes and 13,000 empty lots).

My Leadershape vision is to rehab and fill the vacant homes in Baltimore City, to create housing opportunities for those who need them and to encourage the creation of healthy, vibrant neighborhoods and city schools within the communities. I believe that the issues and problems we see have valuable solutions and can be solved.