Public Service, Personal Growth

UBalt’s newest initiative defines the next generation of internships for students and employers.  

BY MATTHEW LIPTAK

Dr. Debra Y. Brooks and Jeannette Brown Standing in City Hall
Photo of Dr. Debra Y. Brooks, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success, left, and NextGen Leader Jeanette Brown, B.A. ’22, in the Baltimore City Hall rotunda by Chris Myers Photography.

A year ago, Dr. Ann Cotten, B.S. ’85, M.S. ’86, CERT ’92, D.P.A. ’03, director of The University of Baltimore’s Schaefer Center for Public Policy, and Dr. Roger Hartley, dean of the College of Public Affairs, co-authored an opinion piece for The Baltimore Sun addressing the “solvable problem” of unpaid internships and unveiled the University’s ambitious and sweeping solution.

Now entering its second year, the NextGen Leaders for Public Service program gives undergraduate and graduate students from all majors at UBalt the opportunity to explore a career in public service. The program comprises a variety of academic and co-curricular initiatives, but NextGen’s unique paid internship opportunities are the cornerstone.

In their op-ed, Cotten and Hartley acknowledged that “for predominantly minority schools like ours, the unpaid internship is a critical barrier to entry to employment, as well as a lost opportunity for employers to diversify their workplace,” and asked, “Is there a better way to do two important things at once—improve services and have those services delivered by qualified employees who started as students in need of an opportunity?”

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In The Interest of Justice

UBalt’s clinical law program establishes a lasting community legacy through public interest work

BY CHRISTIANNA MCCAUSLAND

Baltimore row homes
Photo by Howard Korn.

Under the Bill of Rights, the Sixth Amendment granted United States citizens the right “to have the Assistance of Counsel” in criminal prosecutions. No such protections were guaranteed for defendants in civil procedures. Millions of people end up representing themselves pro se in housing, family and immigration courts, as well as in other civil legal matters.

This problem is especially acute in eviction courts, where renters are largely left to their own devices and forced to rely on their own limited understanding of landlord/tenant law. The National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel reports that disadvantaged tenants show up for eviction appearances alone and unprepared, while upwards of 90 percent of landlords arrive with legal representation. A 2020 study by the Eviction Research Network showed that Baltimore City, alone, had an eviction rate over two times higher than the national rate.

“Eviction is not a symptom of poverty, it is a cause of poverty,” says Neha Lall, Professor of the Practice and director of externships at The University of Baltimore School of Law, citing the work of Pulitzer Prize winning author and social scientist Matthew Desmond, founder of the Eviction Lab. “When a person is evicted from their home for as little as being five dollars short on rent, the dislocation that occurs is incredibly disruptive to their employment, to their children’s education, to family stability generally. And there really isn’t any social safety net around this.”

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Breaking Through

INSIGHT AND INSPIRATION FOR NAVIGATING MODERN MENTAL HEALTH CARE

BY ANNA RUSSELL

hands reaching out towards each other

If you’ve flown enough times, you know to “secure your own mask before helping others.” If you spend regular time in health and wellness circles, you probably also know this phrase is used as a metaphor for prioritizing self-care. But what happens when you wait for a proverbial drop in cabin pressure to make sure there are enough masks to go around?

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves cut off from both supplies and services—and caught off guard by their lack of preparedness to deal with that.

“The pandemic forced people to sit with their thoughts—literally quarantine with them—some for the first time, and some right alongside their families,” explained Dr. Tiffaney Parkman, director of The University of Baltimore’s B.A. in Human Services program. “Maybe before, their normal way of coping was to ignore their issues or problems, but now, they couldn’t access their usual distractions. People began to realize they didn’t have an actual plan for their mental health care.”

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