Bridge Builders Award
Greater Homewood Community Corporation and The Johns Hopkins University Center on Aging and Health for developing a unique, ten-year partnership that has resulted in the Baltimore Experience Corps, a model program that brings the time, experience, and wisdom of older adults to bear in improving the academic and behavioral outcome of children in Baltimore City Public Schools.
Both the Greater Homewood Community Corporation (GHCC) and The Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health (COAH) have always been assets in their Baltimore community for individuals of all ages in different ways. However, through a unique partnership, this community based organization and this world-class academic research institution have been able to work together to both serve students and older adults through the Baltimore City school system’s Experience Corps® program, and also provide effective data for the improvement of the national Experience Corps® model.
Dr. Linda Fried, Director of COAH, led the development of the national Experience Corps® program, which pairs older adult volunteers with local schools in tutoring and mentoring roles. After several years overseeing the national pilot, she wanted to bring the program to her hometown and the Baltimore City schools and include a strong research and evaluation component, something that the other programs around the country did not have. She was joined in this endeavor by Sylvia McGill of GHCC, who was looking for ways to improve the academic performance of six poorly performing neighborhood schools.
They started by pairing fifty senior adults with three schools, which quickly expanded to six schools that were studied over the course of a five-year pilot program. As a result of the success demonstrated through the evaluation of the pilot program, the program has since grown to 20 schools with 375 adults who have contributed over 110,000 hours to the schools and is currently experiencing increasing demand among new schools for expansion. Among many outcomes found by the ongoing research and evaluation, the children and schools have already shown improved standardized test results and reported a better teaching environment, and older adults have reported feeling needed, being more physically active, and having a renewed support system.
From the outset, there were concerns both inside and outside the local and national Experience Corps community about the often opposing priorities of strict research guidelines at COAH and program operations at the schools that need to be flexible. However, through the mutual recognition that the best way to develop a strong, sustainable program is to provide evidence of its success, and also through ongoing communication and strong leadership, the two groups have demonstrated that these two interests can work together. As a result, Baltimore’s Experience Corp program is the ‘gold standard’ of the national initiative, with further developed criteria and better developed recruitment and support systems.