All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Career Q&A: Stephen Ho '14 on his role at Hungry Harvest

Every so often, we chat with a young alum about what they do and how they got there. Today, we’re talking with Stephen Ho ’14, business technology administration. Stephen, who played for UMBC’s Final Four soccer team as a student here, is now director of logistics and customer service at Hungry Harvest, a startup that recovers “ugly” produce from grocery stores and delivers it to subscribers weekly, donating food to the hungry for every box sold. Hungry Harvest gained national recognition after being featured on ABC’s Shark Tank earlier this year, and the company is now looking to expand from the Baltimore-Washington area into other locations on the East Coast.

Name: Stephen Ho

Job Title/Employer: Director of Logistics and Customer Service at Hungry Harvest, LLC

Major/Minor: Business Technology Administration

Grad Year: 2014

Describe your path to Hungry Harvest. How did you end up working there? After graduating from UMBC, I was not exactly sure what I wanted to do [besides] play soccer. Once that road had closed, I had a friend give me an opportunity at Hungry Harvest. I was not really sure what I was in for but enjoy working each day.

Talk me through a typical day at a startup like Hungry Harvest. A typical day at Hungry Harvest includes early mornings and late nights. We work at the Maryland Center of Entrepreneurship and are in the office from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on a daily basis and even later at times. While the workload is a lot, it is very necessary to keep growing the startup. With that being said, we have a very fun work environment and we enjoy working at the office with our small group of employees.

Your company was recently featured on Shark Tank. How has that changed things for your business? Since Shark Tank aired, we have doubled our deliveries and have hundreds of people on the waitlist from all over the country and world. We recently just expanded to Philadelphia as well.

How has your UMBC experience affected your career path? Which professors or classes stood out? While attending UMBC I had no idea I would end up in this position or role but nothing can take away from the experience and memories I had [here]. Playing soccer there is something I will never forget and I could say that my coaches and all my teachers stood out.

Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give an incoming UMBC student? Knowing what I know now, I would tell incoming UMBC students to take advantage of every day that they have there and to actually stay on campus on weekends. College will fly by and you’ll miss it once it’s all done with.

Tell us what you’ve been up to in a class note!

Career Q&A: Stephen Ho ’14 on his role at Hungry Harvest

Name: Stephen Ho

Job Title/Employer: Director of Logistics and Customer Service at Hungry Harvest, LLC

Major/Minor: Business Technology Administration

Grad Year: 2014

Tell us what you’ve been up to in a class note!

Video offers a fresh and fascinating take on UMBC’s language diversity

When Christine Mallinson asked her students to find a new way to highlight UMBC’s linguistic diversity, she knew they’d get creative. In fact, they made waves in the education world with a video that viewers across the country have praised as “inspiring” and “fascinating.”

Mallinson, an associate professor of language, literacy, and culture (LLC), taught a graduate seminar in fall 2015 titled “Language in Diverse Schools and Communities.” As part of the course, students collaborated with Frankie Films, a video production company headed by Francesca Cerquetti ’14, visual arts, to produce “Voices of UMBC.” The video features students from across the university sharing their experiences and celebrating linguistic diversity as a cultural resource.

“We knew we wanted to maximize the visibility of linguistic diversity in the film, so we tried to make sure we had many languages represented,” explains Mallinson. “It didn’t just have to be foreign language diversity, it’s also diversity within English, and we knew we wanted sign language represented as well.”

Students in the seminar wrote and shared their linguistic autobiographies and discovered a deep sense of pride and connection to their linguistic heritage. When they started the video production process, they sought to shed light on the educational and social benefits that students experience when they share connections with people from varying language backgrounds.

“Because language gives us a different way of describing, knowing, and interacting with the world, we can gain new insights and perspectives through our interactions with people of diverse language backgrounds,” says Kimberly Feldman, a Ph.D. student in LLC who worked on the film. “I think the film captures some of the joy people feel about their language heritage as well as the excitement of being around and engaging with people who speak other languages and dialects.”

The student filmmakers crafted questions, recruited students to interview, and edited the film to emphasize the voice and individual experiences of each participant. Beyond capturing linguistic diversity at UMBC, the finished film speaks to larger themes, particularly the growing demand for interactions with people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds as the world becomes more globalized and cross-cultural communication skills become more essential.

“Language diversity is such an important resource to have as 21^st-century learners,” shares May Chung, a Ph.D. student in LLC who worked on the film. “We need to build a communicative competence…it’s all part of being a global citizen, and I am pleased to pioneer our project at UMBC.”

Mallinson presented “Voices of UMBC” at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) annual meeting in January, where it was very well received. She says linguists are beginning to do more research and outreach on bringing awareness of diversity to higher education, and UMBC is emerging as a leader in this field.

“One person during the [LSA meeting] comment session said ‘UMBC students get it.’ The film exemplifies the fact that we understand what it is to celebrate diversity,” Mallinson shares.

“All too often we talk about diversity in a superficial way without really delving into what the word actually means,” says Deanna Cerquetti, a Ph.D. student in LLC who worked on the film. “By allowing people the opportunity to talk about their linguistic backgrounds, we begin to paint the picture of who they really are and where they come from.”

Mallinson and her students are scheduled to present “Voices of UMBC” at the upcoming SouthEastern Conference on Linguistics later this month in New Orleans. There they plan to further demonstrate a leading model for how language outreach can occur on a college campus—the UMBC model. The students will also present the video at UMBC’s Graduate Research Conference on March 23, 2016.

Note: Other project collaborators include LLC students Ron Collins and Tissa Thomas, and Mercedes Lopez, a master’s student in text, technologies, and literature.

Image: (From left to right) Deanna Cerquetti, Kimberly Feldman, May Chung, and Christine Mallinson. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Michelle Stefano and Bill Shewbridge screen ‘Mill Stories’ documentary in Baltimore

For the last three years, UMBC students and faculty have been working on a project to safeguard the heritage of the Sparrows Point Steel Mill community and to amplify the voices and stories of the people who worked there.

As part of the ongoing project, Michelle Stefano, visiting assistant professor of American studies, Bill Shewbridge, professor of the practice of media and communication studies, and their students have recorded interviews with Sparrows Point workers and community members. The work has transformed into a documentary in response to feedback from the community to contextualize the individual steelworker stories and to build a broader narrative about what life was like at Sparrows Point.

The documentary Mill Stories has been screened at film festivals both domestically and internationally. Most recently, On March 6, the film was screened in Baltimore at the Museum of Industry and it was covered in the local news media by WYPR’s Maryland Morning and the Baltimore Sun.

“It’s about promoting and keeping alive this living heritage,” Stefano told WYPR’s Tom Hall. “The significance of the mill and its history lives on in the minds and hearts of those who knew it.”

Read more about the ongoing project on the Mill Stories website.

Image: Sparrows Point employee interview. Photo by Bill Shewbridge.

Summer fellowships awarded to UMBC faculty across disciplines to pursue impactful research

The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) has awarded Summer Faculty Fellowships (SFFs) to 11 faculty across disciplines. The SFF program supports non-tenured, tenure-track UMBC faculty pursuing research and scholarly projects during the summer. Supplemental funding for the program was provided by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) for an additional 11 awards. OVPR funded seven awards for CAHSS, two for the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), and two for the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT).

“UMBC is excited about the impactful scholarship which our Summer Faculty Fellowship recipients will be pursuing this summer,” says Vice President for Research Karl Steiner. “I am confident that many of these projects will lead to externally funded, long-term endeavors which will contribute significantly to the recipients’ respective disciplines.”

A brief description of each 2016 SFF project is found below:

Jasmine Abrams, assistant professor of psychology, will research how stress influences cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk among black women, a group that is disproportionately affected by the disease, to inform future research and prevention strategies.

Ian Anson, assistant professor of political science, was awarded SFF funding to investigate how media narratives shape citizens’ attributions of responsibility for national economic conditions.

William Blake, assistant professor of political science, will examine voting behavior on ballot measures and state constitutions to broaden theories of economic voting behavior.

Colleen Burge, assistant professor of marine biotechnology, was awarded funding through the SFF program to measure oyster immune responses to an emerging disease to be used a biomarkers for oyster health.

Eric Campbell, assistant professor of philosophy, received support to publish a journal article that explains subjectivism, the idea that a person’s reasons for action are justified by their desires and attitudes, is ultimately a question about how to conduct ethical discourse and explores why the quasi-realist strategy to save moral discourse is self-undermining.

Chris Curran, assistant professor of public policy, received SFF funding to study the influence of states, school boards, principals, teachers, and other stakeholders on school discipline policies while assessing variations across school populations. The results will inform policymakers as they work to improve equality in disciplinary outcomes for students.

Thania Muñoz Díaz, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding to support research on the representation of Mexican migration from the perspective of women, translation, and cultural memory.

Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, received SFF funding to use aerial and satellite imagery from NASA’s G-LiHT imager to improve the ability to predict how forest structure and composition will respond to landscape fragmentation.

Bronwyn Hunter, assistant professor of psychology, received support to examine discrimination and rejection experiences among formerly incarcerated adults.

Renée Lambert-Brétière, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding through the SFF program to write a book that aims to empower indigenous people of Quebec to develop, manage, and maintain their own language documentation projects.

Jiyoon Lee, assistant professor of education, received SFF funding to investigate U.S. public school teachers’ knowledge, understanding, and competencies related to assessment in K-12 classrooms.

Tania Lizarazo, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding to reimagine and develop a digital storytelling project she collaborated on with activist women to capture visual narratives about survival in Columbia.

Daniel Lobo, assistant professor of biological sciences, will use SFF funding to address the problem of discovering bacterial integrated regulatory-metabolic networks involved in the degradation of carbon sources.

Susan McCully, assistant professor of theatre, received support to write a companion piece to her critically acclaimed production of Kerrmoor to be performed as a stand-alone tragedy, or as the second act of the longer play.

Elizabeth Patton, assistant professor of media and communication studies, was awarded SFF funding to research the politics of media representations of family, privacy, race, gender and class, the politics of media practices in relation to work and play, and the politics of space.

Bryce Peake, assistant professor of media and communication studies, received funding to complete a book project that examines the ways that media sciences and listening practices are historically implicated in British colonial forms of masculinity in Gibraltar.

Hamed Pirsiavash, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, received an SFF to build a machine learning tool that can map sensory data from modalities such as natural images, clip art, and spatial text into a common semantic representation.

Sarah Sharp, assistant professor of visual arts, was awarded SFF funding to develop the “Whole Earth Codex,” a multi-component interactive sculptural artwork that complicates understanding of utopian communities.

Nathaniel Sinnot, assistant professor of theatre, received support to research methods to enhance the theatrical design process through computer programming and innovation.

Michelle Stites, assistant professor of education, was awarded funding through the SFF program to study mathematical interventions for students with learning disabilities.

Christine Yee, assistant professor of economics, received SFF funding to assess the impact of school accountability on the mental health of youth.

Meilin Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received support to understand the impact of turbulent flow physics on mechanisms of drag reduction in efficient fish locomotion.

For more information about the Summer Faculty Fellowship program, visit the SFF website.

Image: Bryce Peake presents his research at a Dresher Center Faculty Micro Talks event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC Mock Trial advances to Opening Round Championships

Note: This story has been updated from the original February 3 version.

UMBC Mock Trial has earned its second consecutive bid to the American Mock Trial Association’s Opening Round Championships (ORCs). The major accomplishment comes after the team earned the second overall bid out of 24 teams at the Baltimore Regional Tournament held February 27-28 at the University of Maryland.

In addition to the team’s overall success, “A” Team attorney Kayla Smith and witness Zachary Garmoe earned All-Region Awards, and “B” Team witness Lily Felber also earned an All-Region Award for her portrayal of the defendant. The “B” Team also won or tied on multiple ballots and had several close rounds against strong national competition.

“What the UMBC students accomplished this past weekend is nothing short of extraordinary,” shares UMBC Mock Trial Coach Ben Garmoe ’13, political science. “The students worked as a team on a level I had not seen this year; simply put, they found another gear. I am beyond excited for the future of the team and program.”

The ORCs will be held in Washington, D.C. on March 19-20 at the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal District Courthouse. UMBC Mock Trial will join teams from around the region to compete for a bid to the National Championship Round.

Earlier this year, UMBC Mock Trial’s “A” team finished in 1st place at the inaugural Charm City Classic Mock Trial Invitational, held January 30-31 at Stevenson University. The tournament included teams from UMBC, Stevenson, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland.

“The Charm City Classic is exciting not just for the results – this was the first time that UMBC hosted a mock trial tournament. We co-hosted the Classic with Stevenson University, and the plan is to make this a yearly event. Hosting an invitational will continue to grow UMBC Mock Trial on a national level as we seek to improve and achieve,” shared UMBC Mock Trial President Cheyenne Smith ’16, biology and psychology after the tournament.

The UMBC Mock Trial “B” Team also competed in the tournament and won the Spirit of the American Mock Trial Association (AMTA) award, an honor given to the team that best exemplifies the spirit of collegiality and professionalism at a tournament.

Additional honors for the “B” team included an Outstanding Witness award given to witness Lily Felber, in her first year of mock trial, for her portrayal of the defendant. “A” team members Kayla Smith and Zachary Garmoe also won Outstanding Witness awards.

For more information on the Charm City Classic and to view additional photos, read “Stevenson, UMBC host inaugural Charm City Classic Invitational Tournament” on Stevenson University’s news site.

Header Image: UMBC Mock Trial “A” team at the Baltimore Regional Tournament. Photo courtesy Ben Garmoe.

Public policy and political science faculty provide analysis on U.S. Senate race and Baltimore mayoral election

With Maryland’s primary just two months away, UMBC faculty are being turned to as experts and analysts for elections across the state.

School of Public Policy Director Donald Norris spoke with WYPR about the Baltimore mayoral election and candidate positioning in the polls. From his perspective, he stated that State Senator Catherine Pugh, although trailing in the polls, is in good position due to her campaign’s finances.

Norris also appeared on WJZ-TV to discuss Maryland’s U.S. Senate race to replace retiring Senator Barbara Mikulski. The last poll showed Congresswoman Donna Edwards just two points ahead of Congressman Chris Van Hollen, but Norris said there’s still plenty of campaigning left.

“We’ve had two back to back polls within a month or so of each other which show them essentially tied,” said Norris, adding, “the two candidates have a lot of opportunity between now and late April which is two months away to convince people to vote for them.”

Political Science Assistant Professor Ian Anson told the Capital Gazette that recent political mischief among campaign websites that redirects visitors to alternate candidate websites has questionable impact.

“Most citizens don’t have the time, resources or interest in politics to visit candidate websites at all; the ones who do are likely members of a highly sophisticated subset of the American population — especially during a Senate primary race,” Anson said, but, he added, “this doesn’t mean that such a strategy can’t have an effect on citizens or campaigns. If a URL redirect catches the attention of journalists or content creators on social media platforms, widely shared critiques of the strategy could damage a candidate’s carefully constructed image,” he said.

Read the complete news coverage below:

Mayor’s race: Can anyone catch Dixon? (WYPR)
Poll: Md. Senate primary tight for Edwards, Van Hollen (WJZ-TV)
Maryland Senate race sees web mischief (Capital Gazette)

Image: Public Policy building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

John Rennie Short argues cities are key to U.S. economic growth and social justice

The economy has been a prominent issue during the presidential campaign with a range of ideas for how to spur growth and development across the country. In a new article published in The Conversation, School of Public Policy Professor John Rennie Short examines the value of growing urban economies as a key element in addressing this issue.

In his article “Want the economy to grow? It’s time to look at cities and efficiency,” Short writes that enhancing American metropolitan areas with better infrastructure, land use, and smarter technology are important steps to increase productivity.

“Metro areas in the U.S. now house 83 percent of the population and are the main site for innovation and job growth. The 100 largest metro areas hold 69 percent of all jobs and are responsible for three-quarters of the nation’s GDP,” explains Short. “If we are serious about growing our economy, then getting our cities to work better is just as important as tax reform or wage policy. The problem is that cities tend to be discussed in terms of redistributional issues, such as welfare or race relations, but rarely as a platform for addressing the ‘economy.’”

Considering making cities larger and more dense as a way to improve economic performance, Short writes about promoting increased public transportation use as an important tool in boosting the economy.

“There are significant cost savings in increasing the ridership of mass transit systems compared with constructing expensive new systems. Even small-scale policy changes have rolling consequences. Improving traffic light sequencing, for example, reduces travel times, emissions, fuel consumption and road accidents.”

In his column, Short also examines social issues and data as other contributing factors in improving efficiency. Read the full article on The Conversation website.

Image: John Rennie Short. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Humanities students launch collaborative digital exhibition with American Antiquarian Society

After an intensive semester-long research project, students in Lindsay DiCuirci’s seminar on women and periodicals created a digital exhibition about what life was like for women working in American textile mills during the nineteenth century. The exhibition lives permanently on the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) website and serves as invaluable resource for scholars and members of the public.

DiCuirci, an assistant professor of English, led a 15-week research process last semester in which students pored over digital archives, periodical publications, databases, and other relevant material exclusively from nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers. They uncovered society’s views on women working in textile mills during this time period and the working environments they encountered to create the digital exhibition “Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print.”

Students and AAS captured this in a powerful description on the exhibition homepage: “These ‘mill girls,’as they came to be known, produced valuable cloth in massive quantity, and what they received in return was something of a double-edged sword. Through the independence offered by self-sustaining employment, they came into contact with commonly oppressive working environments, both dangerous and unfair. Yet, despite the power of the industrial machine and their diminutive name, the mill girls managed to form a coalition and community of their own in response.”

Throughout the research process, “students studied core themes such as working conditions, culture, organized resistance, and labor activism and reform,” explains DiCuirci. “They began by searching hundreds of documents and by the end of the project ended up with around 50 items.”

Working closely during the semester with Molly Hardy, AAS digital humanities curator, students quickly discovered that the popularity of mill girls was largely due to their representation in print. By researching articles in labor magazines such as Voice of Industry to literary publications such as Harper’s, students gained a better understanding of the culture and working conditions in the mills and steps women took to better their lives during the time period.

“The exhibition sheds light on women’s emerging independence during this time, as well as the shift from rural to urban centers that accompanied this first wave of industrialism. From this understanding, the exhibition is not simply about an isolated class of people, but how the mill girls simultaneously witnessed and instigated a notable turning point in American history,” says Elizabeth Chen ’16, English, a student in the class.

“A big part of the importance of the research lies in women’s working conditions today,” shares Brittney Kramer ’16, English. “We might live in an entirely different time period, but women still face similar problems in the workforce.”

Through her research for the exhibition, Kramer found that women were paid less than men and were faced with difficult working conditions in the mills which still exist in areas around the world today. However, she also discovered the fascinating stories that were written by mill girls to illustrate how they viewed the nineteenth century labor movement among young women.

“We can look at the writing that comes from the mill girls themselves and see how there was also liberation in being able to work,” says Kramer. “The phenomenon of so many mill girls publishing pieces of writing, fiction, and poetry is amazing…as a community they really came together and created an entire body of work.”

DiCuirci says the exhibition can serve as an important resource for K-12 teachers, organizations studying labor issues, and scholars.

“This is an example of a project where digital humanities meets pedagogy, and this project can serve as a model for other digital humanities and literature classes.”

To view the complete digital exhibition, visit the American Antiquarian Society’s website.

Images: Photos from “Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print” exhibition, American Antiquarian Society website. Header image: From Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (1855). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Fusion: Ekiben takes an interdisciplinary approach to the restaurant biz

[wpvideo aHnk3EIN]

On a typical Saturday, in the wee hours of the morning — we’re talking two or three a.m. — Nikhil Yesupriya ’13, biological sciences, Steve Chu ’12, economics, and Ephrem Abebe ’13, information systems, are in the kitchen of Chu’s father’s restaurant in Pikesville, chopping, mixing, steaming. By 7:30, they’ve set up shop at the Fells Point Farmers Market, serving up their take on Asian fusion cuisine at the Ekiben food stand.

Ekiben got its start slinging steamed buns and rice bowls at the farmers’ market, and now, roughly a year and a half later, they’re opening a brick-and-mortar location at 1622 Eastern Avenue in Fells. The name refers to the elegant boxed lunches served on Japanese bullet trains, and on the morning we visited, the stand was serving up chicken meatballs seasoned with soy and five-spice powder, pork vindaloo with local veggie salsa, and tofu curry dotted with green peas.

They’ve made a few other notable appearances in the region since they started, in places like DC’s Emporiyum festival, TEDx Baltimore, and UMBC’s own Homecoming carnival. Their story — three college guys getting together on Friday nights to cook for Habitat for Humanity bake sales before combining their unique talents and interests to start a successful business — is a uniquely UMBC tale of entrepreneurship.

Ekiben’s cuisine was inspired, in part, by the many cultural events they were able to attend as undergrads. “We’d go to all these cultural shows, any dinner that SASA [South Asian Student Association] or FASA [Filipino American Student Association] or the Asian Student Association was having, and we just loved eating their food,” says Yesupriya.

“It sounds like kind of a college thing to do…you want free food, you go to wherever there is free food. But we really enjoyed going to these places and experiencing the food and making friends with these people and cooking with them,” he adds.

Combining their experiences cooking for themselves, for their friends, and in real restaurants, the three incorporated a business and opened the stand in August 2014. Chu, in addition to being the son of a restaurateur, used to manage a Chipotle, and worked for a time for a chef in New York. He’s now Ekiben’s executive chef. Abebe is the logistics guy, making sure the booth is set up and running properly at the farmers’ market and other venues. Yesupriya is responsible for marketing the stand and engaging with customers.

With two out of the three pursuing graduate study at UMBC, and with their permanent location set to open soon, the guys have been running the stand with the help of a small cadre of interns, including Bona Lee ’09, psychology and sociology, one of their old friends from Habitat for Humanity. Lee works full time at a payroll office and helps out at Ekiben in her spare time, drawing the day’s specials on the chalkboard and helping to prep, plate, and serve the food. “[It’s a] labor of love,” she says.

Love for the food, love for the customers, and love for the city of Baltimore.

—Julia Celtnieks ’13
Video by Elena DeBold ’10

Connect with Ekiben on Facebook or Instagram

You Help Our Students Change the World: Celebrating The Hilltop Society

Guests enjoyed dances choreographed and performed by UMBC students.

There is no question that one of the secrets to UMBC’s incredible success is our dedicated donors. This past fall, we took an evening to say a special thank you to a very important group of our supporters, the Hilltop Society. These generous leadership donors support the university annually with gifts of $1,000 or more, providing powerful support for research, teaching, student activities, financial aid, and more. Their leadership gifts make an incredible difference to the University—and to every student at UMBC.

In November, we invited Hilltop Society members to join us in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building. That night, they had the opportunity to meet the students and faculty they are supporting. They also enjoyed dances that were choreographed by some of our talented UMBC students.

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski visits with donors Joy and Kingsley Achikeh and scholarship recipient Marta Stachorowski.

Two UMBC students, Markus Proctor, interdisciplinary studies, and Emily Grace, English, shared their stories with donors. Grace, a humanities scholar, shared her experiences as a member of UMBC’s Engineers Without Borders, a program that gives students a chance to create a more stable and prosperous world by addressing people’s basic human needs, such as clean water, power, sanitation, and education.

Proctor, recipient of the Joseph and Freida Faiman Eisenberg/VPC, Inc. Scholarship, told donors that after a stellar high school career that included captaining robotics teams and internships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, he set his sights on college. Although many schools offered Proctor admission, UMBC was the only school that also offered him much-needed financial aid.

Markus Proctor, scholarship recipient, shares his story.

That support and UMBC’s culture turned out to be just what Proctor wanted. “UMBC is not too big or too small, but it is the right size to build truly amazing relationships with professors and administrators,” says Proctor. He went on to share that his current and future successes—and those of so many UMBC students—hinged on the support of our donors.

“I have to admit, it is difficult to put into words how thankful I am for your support, however, just know, the magnitude of your impact on our campus is appreciated by every student,” Proctor said, echoing the sentiments of all our UMBC scholarship recipients.

—Meredith Purvis

The Choice Program at UMBC expands its jobs program through new cafe at UB School of Law

Two university presidents and Baltimore city youth joined hands to cut a cake bedecked in a giant red ribbon celebrating the grand opening of the city’s first Flying Fruit Cafe.

The cafe is part of a job training program out of The Choice Program at UMBC that serves 200 local youth each year. Located on the sixth floor of the University of Baltimore (UB) John and Frances Angelos Law Center, it offers year-round job training and employment skills development for Baltimore area youth, with coaching, mentoring, and structured engagement activities provided by AmeriCorps members, all based in a vibrant university environment.

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke presented remarks during the ribbon cutting ceremony held on February 18, 2016. AmeriCorps Opportunity Youth Matt Smith and Daesha Johnson shared their personal experiences with The Choice Program and the profound impact it has had on their lives.

Daesha described how the Choice Program provided a support network for her as she worked toward completing her high school diploma and helped put her on a path toward college and a career in nursing.

“Choice gave me that support…by allowing me to have the opportunity to be a leader among my peers and awareness of being a good example,” shared Daesha.

Matt explained how the Choice Jobs Program helped him confront and overcome challenges, and realize his potential.

“I never thought I’d find myself in this line of work, working with youth as an AmeriCorps Opportunity Youth, providing job training to kids like me when I was growing up,” said Matt. “I must say, The Choice Program has changed my commitment to serve my city.”

The Choice Program currently operates a Flying Fruit smoothie stand at Camden Yards during the baseball season and a Flying Fruit kiosk at the Inner Harbor behind the Maryland Science Center from April to October.

“Having a job and the skills to be successful in a work environment are essential,” says LaMar Davis, director of The Choice Program. “Most of us can remember how important our first job felt. Our youth need access to the opportunities that match their potential. This cafe offers a year-round on-the-job supported employment training model that helps young people enter into the world of work, building confidence and competencies.”

“UB has been pleased to partner with UMBC’s Choice Program to establish the Flying Fruit Cafe at the law school,” says Victoria Schultz, associate dean for administration at the UB School of Law. “The cafe is a wonderful addition to UB that builds community in so many ways.”

The Choice Program at UMBC is a nationally recognized model for community-based intervention that has served more than 20,000 youth and their families from Maryland’s highest risk communities for more than 27 years. Fifty AmeriCorps Community Service-Learning Fellows provide critical contact, mentoring, and advocacy to young people involved in the juvenile justice and social services systems.

The program’s partnership with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) extends for more than 25 years. Focus areas of intervention include education, employment, family involvement, and community supervision. The program works within high poverty communities to reduce external obstacles to youth and family success. Last year, 92% of participating youth completed the program and were not adjudicated with new charges.

“We need to provide young people with pathways to become contributing citizens to their community,” affirms Davis. “By using a cascading model of service, The Choice Program at UMBC is launching youth leaders who understand the challenges and have the tools to impact their community’s most pressing issues. When we give the right supports and structure, our youth and families can transform their world.”

Images: Dawn Kirstaetter, Baltimore deputy mayor; President Hrabowski; Matt Smith; Daesha Johnson; LaMar Davis; UB President Kurt Schmoke. Official ribbon cutting of cafe. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Career Q&A: Stephen Ho '14 on his role at Hungry Harvest

Career Q&A: Stephen Ho ’14 on his role at Hungry Harvest

Video offers a fresh and fascinating take on UMBC’s language diversity

Michelle Stefano and Bill Shewbridge screen ‘Mill Stories’ documentary in Baltimore

Summer fellowships awarded to UMBC faculty across disciplines to pursue impactful research

UMBC Mock Trial advances to Opening Round Championships

Public policy and political science faculty provide analysis on U.S. Senate race and Baltimore mayoral election

John Rennie Short argues cities are key to U.S. economic growth and social justice

Humanities students launch collaborative digital exhibition with American Antiquarian Society

Fusion: Ekiben takes an interdisciplinary approach to the restaurant biz

Connect with Ekiben on Facebook or Instagram

You Help Our Students Change the World: Celebrating The Hilltop Society

The Choice Program at UMBC expands its jobs program through new cafe at UB School of Law

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