With Vivian Armor ’73, director, Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship

You wake up one morning with a big, bright light bulb bobbing above your head. You start your day, feed the dog, the light getting brighter by the minute. Pretty soon, it’s keeping you up at night. Well, congratulations. Your “big idea” has arrived – and with it, a world of possibility.

So, now what? Do you cash in your life savings for seed money? Get a fancy business degree? Buy the book by that guy in the suit covered in question marks?

Maybe you take some (absolutely) free advice from Vivian Armor ’73, American studies. She is director of UMBC’s Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and has some tips about how to move ahead safely and smartly so you can make all your wildest dreams come true.

Read the full “How To” story by Jenny O’Grady in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

When Jason Woody ’04, sociology, received his acceptance letter to be part of the first class of the Shriver Living Learning Center (SLLC) ten years ago, he wanted to be a film major. And though he was interested in the social justice focus of the new center, he was also enticed by Erickson Hall, the sleek new dorm on campus that SLLC students would call home.

Woody found the SLLC’s service mentality contagious and it quickly came to define his worldview. In his sophomore year, he came across a poster asking students to dedicate service hours to honor those killed in the 9/11 attacks and took that call to heart. Back in his dorm room, he paged through biographies of the victims.

The story of Deora Bodley – a college student who died aboard United Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania – gripped him most personally. Friends remembered Bodley for her own dedication to serving others. In her name, Woody launched a mentorship program for elementary-aged Baltimore youth to learn team-building skills: Project Team. The Shriver Center offered a van, help recruiting volunteers and credibility with partner organizations.

Shriver Center Director Michele Wolff remembers designing the SLLC to reflect “the true essence of service-learning.” Community members are required to complete both regular service throughout their residency and coursework that provides context and promotes reflection. As an affinity program, the SLLC also offers students a purposeful living experience with a built-in peer support network to help them confront the demands of service commitments.

Woody credits the support of fellow SLLC residents for his growth as a service leader. Kelly Subramanian ’08, biology and psychology, a former SLLC resident assistant, understands his perspective. “Personal relationships develop where you’re not only living together, you’re also serving together,” she says.

By the time Subramanian arrived a few years after Woody, the SLLC had already developed a reputation for its unique way of fostering students’ intellectual and personal growth. The program itself – more than the sleek new dorm – had become the attraction. “You’re helping other people and learning about what’s out there, but you’re also learning about yourself, what you value and what you want to do with your life,” Subramanian reflects.

Senior Benjamin Davis ’12, who hopes to teach in Baltimore City after graduation, calls the SLLC “a home for people just like me who expressed passion or interest in volunteering.” Davis tackled personal hardships and shyness, he says, by “working with other civically engaged individuals.”

Jason Woody never did take a single film class at UMBC. Instead, he pursued a career serving adults with mental illness. His organization, B’more Clubhouse, offers transitional employment and social and educational programs to help adults with mental illness develop confidence, skills and meaningful relationships, and reduce stigma against mental illness in the broader community. “I’ve seen people achieve milestones, big and small, that are life-changing,” he says.

Woody adds that he is still learning from others through service. His work has helped him develop patience and understanding. In this way, he says, the members of B’more Clubhouse are now his teachers.

— Dinah Winnick

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

In 2008, former UMBC Retriever pitcher Zach Clark ’06, psychology, was with the Frederick Keys – a Class A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles – when he got the news that he was needed at Class AAA Norfolk Tides for a spot starting assignment.

The good news traveled fast, but Clark didn’t. It was only after a long bus trip with the Keys from Kinston, NC, to Myrtle Beach, SC, and an early morning flight to Syracuse, NY, that Clark finally joined his new club. He pitched for the Tides that same night.

“I slept at the hotel during the day, went to the field and pitched,” recalls Clark, who has played in the Orioles farm system since 2006. “That was pretty crazy. I didn’t know anybody. That was my first time at Triple A.”

Signed by Orioles’ scout Dean Albany as a non-drafted free agent after leaving UMBC in 2006, Clark started this season pitching for the Class AA Bowie Baysox. He began 2011 with a minor league record of 24-28 and an ERA of 3.61 in 119 games.

Clark knows life as a pitcher on-call is part of the path to the big leagues. He once battled heavy traffic from Bowie to Norfolk, VA to take the mound for Tides in a night game.

In games through Aug. 4 of this season Clark was 6-7 with an ERA of 5.14 in 18 games (with 17 starts) for Bowie in the Eastern League. Clark was named the Eastern League pitcher of the week on May 2 of this season.

— David Driver

This story originally ran in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Open the door to Annapolis’ Rams Head Tavern and the sounds of upbeat banjo and guitar

fly out into the warm night air, followed by closely by the gruff voice of Adam Trice ’04, English – who’s in the middle of a 45-minute set with his band, Red Sammy.

“It ain’t you, it ain’t her,” Trice growls tunefully in a song called “It Ain’t You (Carolina Road Anthem).” “I’m heading south, but I’m not sure. You got me high, it’s kind of funny. I’m playing bars for gas money.”

Trice dubs Red Sammy’s music as “graveyard country” because he likes the verbal interplay of the phrase. “I feel like it brings up a lot of different connotations that are associated with those two words,” explains Trice. The band has released a few records, including A Cheap Kind of Love Song and Dog Hang Low, both of which are available online or at the band’s shows.

Studying literature at UMBC had a hand in his musical direction. “My music’s more lyric driven, and I think it really banks off my English degree,” he explains. “A lot of electives in the creative writing track. They are the strong focus from which I draw.”

While Trice also pursues a day job as director of foundation relations and grant writing and development at Capitol College in Laurel, he enjoys playing for tips in a Jeremiah Weed bucket and is going to keep playing for the foreseeable future. “My plan is to continue pushing the art and seeing where that goes,” he says.

— Derek Roper ’11

Originally published in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Among the highlights of UMBC’s Homecoming 2011 is a ceremony that honors university alumni who have achieved distinction in a wide range of disciplines and careers.

The UMBC Alumni Association – which selects recipients and presents the awards – moved the annual Outstanding Alumni of the Year ceremony back to campus in 2009, and it has since become a key element of the university’s celebration of school spirit.

This year’s recipients of the awards – which will be presented on Thursday, October 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery – include alumni who’ve reached prominence in the fields of technology, medicine, journalism and business. This year’s recipients are:

Ralph Semmel ’92, Ph.D., computer science, is the UMBC Alumnus of the Year in Engineering and Information Technology. In 2010, Semmel was named as the eighth director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory – one of the most prominent hubs of advanced technological research in the world.

Ronita Marple, ’05, Ph.D., chemistry, is the UMBC Alumna of the Year in the Natural and Mathematical Sciences. She is an analytical chemist and senior scientist for consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. (Read a profile of Marple)

Jamie Smith Hopkins ’98, English, is the UMBC Alumna of the Year in the Humanities. She has been a reporter at The Baltimore Sun since 1999, and writes and blogs for the paper on the housing industry in the Baltimore metropolitan region. (UMBC Magazine profiled Hopkins in its Summer 2010 issue.)

Garrett Wright ’01, theatre, is the UMBC Alumnus of the Year in the Visual and Performing Arts. Wright is a Bridge Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he puts his legal skills to work combating racial profiling in New York City’s Police Department. He is also a staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project, which provides legal advice to tenants and tenant organizations.

Dr. Jeffery Wilkinson ’89, interdisciplinary studies, is the UMBC Alumnus of the Year in the Social Sciences. He works at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine, and he has won renown as a global leader in combating obstetric fistula in some of the poorest regions of the world – including Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. (Wilkinson was profiled in the Summer 2009 issue of UMBC Magazine.)

Delali Dzirasa ’04, computer engineering, is UMBC’s Young Alumni Rising Star. He is the owner of Fearless Solutions, a cybersecurity company based in the bwtech@UMBC Research Park that focuses on secure software development, and already boasts several contracts with the federal government.

— Richard Byrne ’86

This article appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

This year’s Arts and Humanities Afternoon at UMBC Homecoming on Saturday, October 15, 2011 will focus on alumni filmmakers. To whet your appetite for our afternoon discussion on the art of moving images, we’d like to introduce you to some of the filmmakers who’ll be coming to the event, which will be held in the Skylight Room of the UMBC Commons from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. We’re also planning some screenings of the work of these filmmakers on campus in the week before the event. Please stay tuned!

Films by the alumni filmmakers will be shown at the Skylight Room in The Commons on the following dates:
Monday, October 10, 2011 at 7 p.m.: Saved! (Brian Dannelly ’97)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 7 p.m.: Films by Richard Chisolm ’82, Steven Fischer ’98 and Daphne Gardner ’09

Read more about these alumni in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Once upon a time, Joseph T. Jones, Jr. thought he couldn’t escape the city’s mean streets. Now he’s leading efforts to help reclaim the families broken by urban ills.
By Elizabeth Heubeck ’91
Photos by Bruce Weller
Searing waves of heat already ripple through West Baltimore at 9 a.m. on a Friday in July. The streets around 2201 N. Monroe Street – headquarters of the Baltimore-based nonprofit Center for Urban Families (CFUF) – are all but deserted.
Inside the center’s air-conditioned conference room, 40 or so adults – men and women, black and white, some as young as 18 and others old enough to be grandparents – sit in neat lines of metal folding chairs, sweating a
bout their future. Some look anxious, others bleary-eyed. Most of the men wear ties, pressed pants and dress shoes; the women are in heels, panty hose and skirts. Some are ex-convicts. Many have been involved with the drug trade. Others have held jobs but haven’t been able to keep them.
If the room has the solemn air of a funeral, there’s a good reason. Everyone here is preparing to say goodbye to their old lives and start anew through the CFUF’s signature program, STRIVE, which is modeled after a prototype launched in New York City’s East Harlem.
When the center’s founder and CEO, Joseph T. Jones, Jr. ’06, social work, walks to the front of the room, everyone seems to sit up a little straighter. Standing more than six feet tall in a dark blue pin stripe suit, Jones’ imposing stature and deep, authoritative voice command the room. But his story also grabs attention with this audience: He’s walked a remarkably similar path.
“All the things I did suggest I should be dead, incarcerated, or debilitated,” Jones tells the group.
Jones’ path was particularly rocky: He was the product of a broken family. He shot heroin at 13, and was arrested for the first time at 14. He spent more time in Maryland’s juvenile justice system than he did in a high school classroom. And Jones’ career as a drug dealer saw him only narrowly escape a lengthy federal prison sentence.
But Jones is living proof that hard knocks don’t always knock you out. His West Baltimore center promotes stable career paths and rebuilds strong family units among urban residents, and Jones is sharing his successes with national audiences – including meetings with former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. and a place on President Barack Obama’s Taskforce on Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families.
Healthy families are the building block for any American renaissance, argues Jones. “Twenty-five million children live in households where their fathers are not present. As a society, we can’t have that number of children not having a relationship with their fathers.”
Rough Beginnings
Jones remembers the breakup of his own family at age nine with chilling clarity.
“My father, he was ex-military,” Jones recalls. “I remember him packing his [military] duffel bag one day.” Jones watched from the living room window, which overlooked the entrance to East Baltimore’s Lafayette Courts projects, as his father put his duffel bag in the car and drove away. Life with a single mother left Jones “crossing boundaries,” as he puts it. He became friends with a crowd that plunged him into heroin use and selling drugs. And his first drug-related arrest and sentence to 30 days in a juvenile detention facility didn’t exactly scare him straight. “One of my best friends from the street was there. He created a seamless pathway
for me to have no trouble in that system,” Jones recalls. As Jones cycled in and out of the juvenile justice system and grew ever-deeper roots to drugs and crime, a part of him remained open to a different path. Ironically, it was Jones’ father, barely present in his life since leaving with his duffel bag, who planted the seed on a visit to his son in juvenile detention.
Jones’ father brought him Manchild in the Promised Land, a book by Claude Brown which tells the story of the author’s coming of age (and escaping) poverty-stricken and drug-filled 1960s Harlem. The book led Jones to other influential autobiographies, including those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy.
“I was preparing myself for now, but not intentionally,” Jones says. “I was always attracted to stories about people who were making change in society.”
Almost Lost
Jones says he had a talent for masking problems under a façade of normality. He managed to earn his GED, attend community college, and was even admitted to a management training program with the Social Security Administration.
Under that surface, however, Jones remained unchanged. Indeed, he was brazen enough to sell drugs out of the Social Security Administration building.
He believed he was successfully evading police detection until one day he was asked to attend a meeting during work hours in the organization’s auditorium. When he arrived, he was greeted by members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Jones recalls the arrest was “a complete embarrassment.” His mother and grandmother also worked at Social Security Administration, and dealing in that building brought a federal drug charge. He was also suspended without pay and removed from the management training program.
Eventually Jones pled guilty to a misdemeanor and avoided jail time. But even that humiliating arrest did not create a final break with his addiction to heroin and cocaine and his drug crimes. For years, he observes, “faith and fate” allowed him to narrowly avoid lengthy jail sentences.
Jones started to weary of the game, however. On October 3, 1986, he knocked on the door of Spring Grove’s residential drug treatment program. “Part of me wanted to stop doing drugs,” Jones recalls. But the real motivation was to avoid a jail sentence for five new criminal charges. The choice was simple: drug treatment or jail.
A year in drug rehabilitation helped Jones finally make a break with his former life. For the first time since he could remember, he was sleeping and eating well and exercising regularly. At year’s end, Jones was ready to commit to the “phase out” stage of the treatment program, which required him to have a plan to continue his recovery. Jones decided on the community college degree he’d started but never finished.
Now in his thirties, his experience at Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) was decidedly different after rehab. Jones became the top student in the college’s accounting program. He also met his future wife, Debra Scovens, who was an assistant to BCCC’s dean of admissions.
They have now been married for 21 years and have three children. Armed with a new family and newfound confidence and stability, Jones was ready to pursue helping others change their lives as he had changed his own.
Making Waves in Public Policy
Jones took several part-time jobs to make ends meet during community college. One job involved working with a community-based organization that provided health and HIV/AIDS education, where his primary role was negotiating contracts with drug treatment centers and providing health and HIV education to their clients.
Jones parlayed that job into a grant-funded position with the Baltimore City Health Department to ensure that pregnant women in the city received prenatal care. As he worked with these women, he had an epiphany about the connections between their challenges and his own upbringing. “I’m dragging these women from crack houses to prenatal care,” he recalls, “then they’re going home to these guys who were saying, ‘We need help, too…. Public policy wasn’t addressing the issue of fatherhood.”
Health officials urged Jones to take up the cause on his own. And he did. Using the federal government’s Healthy Start Initiative, Jones developed and implemented a “Men’s Services” program within the city health department’s Healthy Start program.
His success with that initiative provided Jones with invitations to high-level conferences on urban families, including one hosted by Vice President Gore and his former wife, Tipper Gore. At that conference, Jones chose to make a splash when he was asked to comment.
“I went off on a tirade about the surface level of the conversation, and how it didn’t meet the needs of the people in the communities where I come from,” Jones recalls. And though he received a round of applause for his outburst, he felt compelled to apologize to Gore for his strong words. That day allowed Jones not only to establish a personal relationship with Gore, but it also garnered him more invitations to discuss the obstacles facing urban families.
Back to School
Jones’ persuasiveness about the importance of jobs and reconnecting families to create an urban renaissance also found an audience closer to home. UMBC president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, attended one of Jones’ speeches and was impressed.
“It was clear he was a masterful communicator,” says Hrabowski. “He was analytical, used his own story and was able to talk about intervention strategies. Most importantly, he spoke with great authenticity.”
When Hrabowski queried Jones about his education and learned that he had an associate’s degree, he didn’t withhold his opinion. “My first reaction was that he had to go back,” Hrabowski recalls. “I knew it would open more doors for him.”
Jones demurred at first, telling UMBC’s president that he was too old, that he had a young family, and that he didn’t qualify for scholarships. But Hrabowski eventually won out, serving as Jones’ mentor as he took his degree at UMBC. In 2006, at the age of 50, Jones graduated cum laude from the university.
“His standard of excellence is so incredibly high,” Jones says of Hrabowski. “He uplifts you just being in his space.”
Success and Standards
Jones’ dynamic presence provides a similar uplift for the men and women he’s working hard to help at the Center for Urban Families.
Take STRIVE. On its surface, the program is a boot camp for coping with the challenges of the contemporary workplace: being on time, dressing appropriately and managing office hierarchies. But it’s also a “reboot” camp to help clients gain self-assurance and self-reliance in all areas of their lives.
“When you see people who come in here, and you look in their eyes,” Jones observes, “there’s almost no hope. You have to convince them that if they follow the structure we have established, they can be successful, regardless of their background,” he says.
At the first day of the STRIVE training on this July morning, most participants come dressed in their best clothing. But one young man, dressed in baggy black pants and untucked shirt, didn’t get the message. Jones summons him to the front of the room.
“Did they explain to you what you had to do to prepare for today, including the dress code?” Jones barks. “Do you want to go through this program?”
The young man’s response is barely audible.
“You’ve got ten minutes to get dressed like this guy,” says Jones, pointing to a man in the front row wearing a dress shirt and slacks, wing tips, and tie. The young man saunters to the back of the room and out the door.
Jones tells those who remain: “We’re going to raise the standard real high, and some of people are going to fall off…. Twenty percent of you won’t be back on Monday.”
When Jones worked for the Baltimore City Health Department, he designed and oversaw innovative programs like STRIVE. But the bureaucracy of working within a government agency frustrated him. “If I wanted to grow beyond now, I knew I couldn’t do it at the health department,” he says. With a nod from his then-boss and former Baltimore City Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson – and financial support from the Abell Foundation and its longtime president, Robert C. Embry, Jr. – Jones was able to strike out on his own.
In 1999, Jones opened the doors to the Center for Urban Families. In the attractive new building in which the nonprofit is housed today, Jones has also started a program to help fathers: Men’s Services Responsible Fatherhood program. The center also launched its first national initiative, Baltimore Building Strong Families, in 2005. The program aims to support new low-income parents with financial know-how and relationship skill building.
Tough Love
Jones attributes the success of the center’s initiatives to a tough-love approach that provides structure and demands discipline. It’s this approach that attracted longtime supporter David L. Warnock, CEO of a Baltimore-based investment firm. He’s been the chairman of the 12-year old nonprofit for more than eight years.
“I like the tough love approach to STRIVE,” says Warnock. “I also like how the model of STRIVE aims to create a sense of accomplishment among a group of people that doesn’t feel much in the way of accomplishment.”
The number of lives touched by STRIVE is also impressive. As of August 2011, more than 4,000 men and women in Baltimore have graduated from the program. And the center has been able to place more than 3,900 of its graduates in jobs with an average starting wage of $8.80 an hour.
Jones relishes telling personal success stories about STRIVE graduates, including La’Roy Charles Alston, Jr., a former gang member in Baltimore City. Two of Alston’s friends were shot within a week. Then Alston himself was shot twelve times and lost a leg. Though he thought about retaliating, Alston decided instead to give STRIVE a try.
“He was saying that he wanted to do something different. Now, he’s getting ready to graduate from Sojourner-Douglass College. He has one of the most infectious personalities, despite living with chronic pain,” says Jones.
Checking back in with Jones on a sunny Friday in August, he’s busily preparing new federal grants for the center and addressing a new class of STRIVE graduates, who enter to strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” decked out in blue caps and gowns.
Jones acknowledges that these graduates are facing some of the toughest economic times in recent memory, but he underscores that their commitment holds the key to success in surmounting it: “Remember when I told you on the first day that we were looking for a few good men and a few good women? You are the few good men and few good women.”
Jones also urges the new graduates not to get complacent. He wants to see them all back at the center bright and early on Monday morning, starting the job hunt.
“We’re going to have your back,” Jones says. “As long as you stay connected.”
 

Once upon a time, Joseph T. Jones, Jr. thought he couldn’t escape the city’s mean streets. Now he’s leading efforts to help reclaim the families broken by urban ills.

By Elizabeth Heubeck ’91
Photos by Bruce Weller

Searing waves of heat already ripple through West Baltimore at 9 a.m. on a Friday in July. The streets around 2201 N. Monroe Street – headquarters of the Baltimore-based nonprofit Center for Urban Families (CFUF) – are all but deserted.

Inside the center’s air-conditioned conference room, 40 or so adults – men and women, black and white, some as young as 18 and others old enough to be grandparents – sit in neat lines of metal folding chairs, sweating a

bout their future. Some look anxious, others bleary-eyed. Most of the men wear ties, pressed pants and dress shoes; the women are in heels, panty hose and skirts. Some are ex-convicts. Many have been involved with the drug trade. Others have held jobs but haven’t been able to keep them.

If the room has the solemn air of a funeral, there’s a good reason. Everyone here is preparing to say goodbye to their old lives and start anew through the CFUF’s signature program, STRIVE, which is modeled after a prototype launched in New York City’s East Harlem.

When the center’s founder and CEO, Joseph T. Jones, Jr. ’06, social work, walks to the front of the room, everyone seems to sit up a little straighter. Standing more than six feet tall in a dark blue pin stripe suit, Jones’ imposing stature and deep, authoritative voice command the room. But his story also grabs attention with this audience: He’s walked a remarkably similar path.

“All the things I did suggest I should be dead, incarcerated, or debilitated,” Jones tells the group.

Jones’ path was particularly rocky: He was the product of a broken family. He shot heroin at 13, and was arrested for the first time at 14. He spent more time in Maryland’s juvenile justice system than he did in a high school classroom. And Jones’ career as a drug dealer saw him only narrowly escape a lengthy federal prison sentence.

But Jones is living proof that hard knocks don’t always knock you out. His West Baltimore center promotes stable career paths and rebuilds strong family units among urban residents, and Jones is sharing his successes with national audiences – including meetings with former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. and a place on President Barack Obama’s Taskforce on Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families.

Healthy families are the building block for any American renaissance, argues Jones. “Twenty-five million children live in households where their fathers are not present. As a society, we can’t have that number of children not having a relationship with their fathers.”

Rough Beginnings

Jones remembers the breakup of his own family at age nine with chilling clarity.

“My father, he was ex-military,” Jones recalls. “I remember him packing his [military] duffel bag one day.” Jones watched from the living room window, which overlooked the entrance to East Baltimore’s Lafayette Courts projects, as his father put his duffel bag in the car and drove away. Life with a single mother left Jones “crossing boundaries,” as he puts it. He became friends with a crowd that plunged him into heroin use and selling drugs. And his first drug-related arrest and sentence to 30 days in a juvenile detention facility didn’t exactly scare him straight. “One of my best friends from the street was there. He created a seamless pathway

for me to have no trouble in that system,” Jones recalls. As Jones cycled in and out of the juvenile justice system and grew ever-deeper roots to drugs and crime, a part of him remained open to a different path. Ironically, it was Jones’ father, barely present in his life since leaving with his duffel bag, who planted the seed on a visit to his son in juvenile detention.

Jones’ father brought him Manchild in the Promised Land, a book by Claude Brown which tells the story of the author’s coming of age (and escaping) poverty-stricken and drug-filled 1960s Harlem. The book led Jones to other influential autobiographies, including those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

“I was preparing myself for now, but not intentionally,” Jones says. “I was always attracted to stories about people who were making change in society.”

Almost Lost

Jones says he had a talent for masking problems under a façade of normality. He managed to earn his GED, attend community college, and was even admitted to a management training program with the Social Security Administration.

Under that surface, however, Jones remained unchanged. Indeed, he was brazen enough to sell drugs out of the Social Security Administration building.

He believed he was successfully evading police detection until one day he was asked to attend a meeting during work hours in the organization’s auditorium. When he arrived, he was greeted by members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

Jones recalls the arrest was “a complete embarrassment.” His mother and grandmother also worked at Social Security Administration, and dealing in that building brought a federal drug charge. He was also suspended without pay and removed from the management training program.

Eventually Jones pled guilty to a misdemeanor and avoided jail time. But even that humiliating arrest did not create a final break with his addiction to heroin and cocaine and his drug crimes. For years, he observes, “faith and fate” allowed him to narrowly avoid lengthy jail sentences.

Jones started to weary of the game, however. On October 3, 1986, he knocked on the door of Spring Grove’s residential drug treatment program. “Part of me wanted to stop doing drugs,” Jones recalls. But the real motivation was to avoid a jail sentence for five new criminal charges. The choice was simple: drug treatment or jail.

A year in drug rehabilitation helped Jones finally make a break with his former life. For the first time since he could remember, he was sleeping and eating well and exercising regularly. At year’s end, Jones was ready to commit to the “phase out” stage of the treatment program, which required him to have a plan to continue his recovery. Jones decided on the community college degree he’d started but never finished.

Now in his thirties, his experience at Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) was decidedly different after rehab. Jones became the top student in the college’s accounting program. He also met his future wife, Debra Scovens, who was an assistant to BCCC’s dean of admissions.

They have now been married for 21 years and have three children. Armed with a new family and newfound confidence and stability, Jones was ready to pursue helping others change their lives as he had changed his own.

Making Waves in Public Policy

Jones took several part-time jobs to make ends meet during community college. One job involved working with a community-based organization that provided health and HIV/AIDS education, where his primary role was negotiating contracts with drug treatment centers and providing health and HIV education to their clients.

Jones parlayed that job into a grant-funded position with the Baltimore City Health Department to ensure that pregnant women in the city received prenatal care. As he worked with these women, he had an epiphany about the connections between their challenges and his own upbringing. “I’m dragging these women from crack houses to prenatal care,” he recalls, “then they’re going home to these guys who were saying, ‘We need help, too…. Public policy wasn’t addressing the issue of fatherhood.”

Health officials urged Jones to take up the cause on his own. And he did. Using the federal government’s Healthy Start Initiative, Jones developed and implemented a “Men’s Services” program within the city health department’s Healthy Start program.

His success with that initiative provided Jones with invitations to high-level conferences on urban families, including one hosted by Vice President Gore and his former wife, Tipper Gore. At that conference, Jones chose to make a splash when he was asked to comment.

“I went off on a tirade about the surface level of the conversation, and how it didn’t meet the needs of the people in the communities where I come from,” Jones recalls. And though he received a round of applause for his outburst, he felt compelled to apologize to Gore for his strong words. That day allowed Jones not only to establish a personal relationship with Gore, but it also garnered him more invitations to discuss the obstacles facing urban families.

Back to School

Jones’ persuasiveness about the importance of jobs and reconnecting families to create an urban renaissance also found an audience closer to home. UMBC president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, attended one of Jones’ speeches and was impressed.

“It was clear he was a masterful communicator,” says Hrabowski. “He was analytical, used his own story and was able to talk about intervention strategies. Most importantly, he spoke with great authenticity.”

When Hrabowski queried Jones about his education and learned that he had an associate’s degree, he didn’t withhold his opinion. “My first reaction was that he had to go back,” Hrabowski recalls. “I knew it would open more doors for him.”

Jones demurred at first, telling UMBC’s president that he was too old, that he had a young family, and that he didn’t qualify for scholarships. But Hrabowski eventually won out, serving as Jones’ mentor as he took his degree at UMBC. In 2006, at the age of 50, Jones graduated cum laude from the university.

“His standard of excellence is so incredibly high,” Jones says of Hrabowski. “He uplifts you just being in his space.”

Success and Standards

Jones’ dynamic presence provides a similar uplift for the men and women he’s working hard to help at the Center for Urban Families.

Take STRIVE. On its surface, the program is a boot camp for coping with the challenges of the contemporary workplace: being on time, dressing appropriately and managing office hierarchies. But it’s also a “reboot” camp to help clients gain self-assurance and self-reliance in all areas of their lives.

“When you see people who come in here, and you look in their eyes,” Jones observes, “there’s almost no hope. You have to convince them that if they follow the structure we have established, they can be successful, regardless of their background,” he says.

At the first day of the STRIVE training on this July morning, most participants come dressed in their best clothing. But one young man, dressed in baggy black pants and untucked shirt, didn’t get the message. Jones summons him to the front of the room.

“Did they explain to you what you had to do to prepare for today, including the dress code?” Jones barks. “Do you want to go through this program?”

The young man’s response is barely audible.

“You’ve got ten minutes to get dressed like this guy,” says Jones, pointing to a man in the front row wearing a dress shirt and slacks, wing tips, and tie. The young man saunters to the back of the room and out the door.

Jones tells those who remain: “We’re going to raise the standard real high, and some of people are going to fall off…. Twenty percent of you won’t be back on Monday.”

When Jones worked for the Baltimore City Health Department, he designed and oversaw innovative programs like STRIVE. But the bureaucracy of working within a government agency frustrated him. “If I wanted to grow beyond now, I knew I couldn’t do it at the health department,” he says. With a nod from his then-boss and former Baltimore City Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson – and financial support from the Abell Foundation and its longtime president, Robert C. Embry, Jr. – Jones was able to strike out on his own.

In 1999, Jones opened the doors to the Center for Urban Families. In the attractive new building in which the nonprofit is housed today, Jones has also started a program to help fathers: Men’s Services Responsible Fatherhood program. The center also launched its first national initiative, Baltimore Building Strong Families, in 2005. The program aims to support new low-income parents with financial know-how and relationship skill building.

Tough Love

Jones attributes the success of the center’s initiatives to a tough-love approach that provides structure and demands discipline. It’s this approach that attracted longtime supporter David L. Warnock, CEO of a Baltimore-based investment firm. He’s been the chairman of the 12-year old nonprofit for more than eight years.

“I like the tough love approach to STRIVE,” says Warnock. “I also like how the model of STRIVE aims to create a sense of accomplishment among a group of people that doesn’t feel much in the way of accomplishment.”

The number of lives touched by STRIVE is also impressive. As of August 2011, more than 4,000 men and women in Baltimore have graduated from the program. And the center has been able to place more than 3,900 of its graduates in jobs with an average starting wage of $8.80 an hour.

Jones relishes telling personal success stories about STRIVE graduates, including La’Roy Charles Alston, Jr., a former gang member in Baltimore City. Two of Alston’s friends were shot within a week. Then Alston himself was shot twelve times and lost a leg. Though he thought about retaliating, Alston decided instead to give STRIVE a try.

“He was saying that he wanted to do something different. Now, he’s getting ready to graduate from Sojourner-Douglass College. He has one of the most infectious personalities, despite living with chronic pain,” says Jones.

Checking back in with Jones on a sunny Friday in August, he’s busily preparing new federal grants for the center and addressing a new class of STRIVE graduates, who enter to strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” decked out in blue caps and gowns.

Jones acknowledges that these graduates are facing some of the toughest economic times in recent memory, but he underscores that their commitment holds the key to success in surmounting it: “Remember when I told you on the first day that we were looking for a few good men and a few good women? You are the few good men and few good women.”

Jones also urges the new graduates not to get complacent. He wants to see them all back at the center bright and early on Monday morning, starting the job hunt.

“We’re going to have your back,” Jones says. “As long as you stay connected.”

The tale of a successful capital campaign is often told by the numbers. And by that yardstick, UMBC’s Exceptional by Example Campaign was a success.

The campaign exceeded its $100 million goal by $15 million – and strengthened UMBC in ways that improve access to the university, attract and retain the best students and faculty and support vital research.

But look past the spreadsheets and statistics and you’ll find stories of individual people – those who gave to the campaign and those whose lives and education were advanced in the effort.

Read the full story in UMBC Magazine‘s Fall 2011 issue, as well as an interview with four prominent alumni, including past (Anita Maddox Jackson ’80) and present (Bennett Moe ’88) presidents of the UMBC Alumni Board, a long-term donor (Emmerson Small ’74), and UMBC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement (Greg Simmons ’04).

Learn more about the results of UMBC’s Exceptional by Example Campaign here.

Congratulations to Scott Ward ’92, director of aquatics at the McDonogh School, who was recently recognized for his excellence in teaching with the Thomas R. Harper Endowed Teaching Chair. From the Reisterstown Patch:

Scott Ward, director of aquatics at the McDonogh School, isn’t much for personal accolades.

Ward, a 1992 UMBC graduate, doesn’t know his record of wins as swimming and water polo coach at McDonogh, where he thinks he’s worked for about 18 years, give or take.

That Ward doesn’t even keep track of the most simple statistic – time of service – makes his point.

“I just feel like it’s not that important,” Ward said. “I can look it up.”

Being more focused on student athletes than himself is perhaps exactly why Ward was awarded the Thomas R. Harper Endowed Teaching Chair at the school.

Read the full story.

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Have your own great news to share? Send it to us as a class note via our website or by email UMBC Magazine editor Richard Byrne at byrne@umbc.edu.