For hands-on careers, this nonprofit leads Baltimore youths with heart
For hands-on careers, this nonprofit leads Baltimore youths with heart
Andrea Riquier, USA TODAYSat, February 28, 2026 at 10:03 AM UTC
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On a bitterly cold November afternoon in Baltimore, the small brick rowhome at 2212 Presstman Street was humming with energy.
The home at 2212 is a fairly typical Baltimore property: About 100 years old, it sat vacant for decades and was in dire need of repair when it was purchased for a few thousand dollars in 2023.
But the buyer, a small nonprofit called Requity, is anything but typical. Requity's blend of sweat equity, youth development and community revitalization is uniquely suited to the edgy energy of Baltimore. On this day, like most, students from various vocational schools were working as a crew: hanging drywall, inspecting an eco-friendly doorframe in the back wall and otherwise rehabbing the home.
Tyrone Gaskins, Requity Construction Instructor
Requity was founded by 54-year-old Michael Rosenband, who traded in a career on Wall Street to move to Baltimore in 2012 and coach sports at Carver High, a vocational school directly across the street from the rowhome. Carver was so strapped for funds, Rosenband had to figure out how to repurpose football cleats for use in the spring baseball season. And as time went by, and he got to know the students and their day-to-day routines, he began to feel something was “amiss.”
Students at a school that ostensibly trained them to do things “weren’t involved,” Rosenband said. When construction crews came to work at the school, students weren’t even present to watch the professionals work.
One day, one of Rosenband’s players suggested Carver students use Baltimore’s many vacant and derelict homes as their curriculum, to learn real-world skills and work processes on the job. It would be a big step up from everyone taking a turn in shop class, the student, Sterling Hardy, thought – and the neighborhood needed all the help it could get.
That vision became Requity, and the first home purchased for that purpose, directly across the street from Carver High, was named Carver House. Five years on, it’s nearly finished and ready to be sold to a member of the community.
With a college-track background that culminated in business school, Rosenband “just hadn't really had an appreciation for that kind of meaningful work,” he said. But he found himself energized by the young people, and his experience with turnaround work clicked into gear.
“Where other people were getting turned off” by the challenges in Baltimore, Rosenband said, “it inspired me, and I was like, I want to go see what I can do.”
The economy needs more skilled workers
Requity addresses a singular challenge of the 21st century economy: the lack of skilled labor. Specific estimates depend on who's counting, and whether the focus is on construction alone, or all trades more broadly, but there's nearly universal agreement that the U.S. needs perhaps as many as millions more people working with their hands.
Rosenband is evangelical about the trades. College isn’t for everyone, he argues. And in a city that’s 60% Black, the reality that only 42% of Black students in bachelor’s programs graduate college within five years – and that those who do manage to graduate owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates – is resonant.
Even more importantly, he says, an interest in, say, carpentry, doesn’t have to mean slinging a hammer all day every day. It may instead be an entrée to a job as a construction manager, a developer or something else.
Being in Requity is “like opening my eyes, being able to actually see all of the components come together and be able to see the from the starting point to the finishing point of the project,” said Keyry (pronounced “Keytee”) Pichinte, a senior who has already been accepted to several colleges. She wants to become a landscape architect.
Rosenband likes to point to a statistic that showed recent grads of Baltimore’s vocational and technical schools only earned $13,000 a year a few years after graduating high school. That figure is somewhat dated now, but a more recent analysis shows a number not much higher. Among the 67 students Requity has placed so far, however, the real-world experience they’ve built up means those students command salaries averaging $49,000.
Nick Johnson, also a senior, has loved his time with Requity so much, he’s thinking about going straight into the workforce after graduating.
“It feels great, because I could be needed for anything,” he said in a February interview. “Somebody could ask me, you know, can you do this? ‘Yeah, of course. I can do everything’.”
Requity exists so young people like Pichinte and Johnson “can realize their potential and start to thrive and change the trajectory of their families,” Rosenband said.
More: Young, single, Black, female: the new face of Baltimore's neighborhoods
Baltimore's comeback
In a place like Baltimore, changing a life trajectory can mean not only a pathway to a better job, but a chance to reshape the entire community. “Charm City,” as it's known locally, is arguably in the midst of a renaissance, led in part by an idealistic young mayor, Brandon Scott, who grew up in gritty West Baltimore just a few miles from Carver House.
More: 'Help us out.' An East Coast city wants to reclaim its 13,000 vacant homes.
After years of deindustrialization and disinvestment, Baltimore’s population now is about 40% smaller than it was in 1970. And 20% of the city’s residents live in poverty, according to census data. Meanwhile, an estimated 13,000 homes sit vacant.
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Justin Bellamy, a recent Carver graduate, participated in Requity in his junior and senior years, learning carpentry skills. He's now in community college, studying construction management.
“I wanted to do hands-on work because of how innovative and creative it is, which is why I got into construction,” Bellamy told USA TODAY. “The more I got into it, I started to realize that I’m not just doing something that I love, but something with a bigger purpose.”
As he became more exposed to the redevelopment going on around Baltimore, Bellamy also learned about redlining – the historical practice of denying financial services or access to real estate to people of color, particularly Black Americans – which is sometimes said to have originated in Baltimore.
Justin Bellamy on the job at Requity
Now, he said, “I want to be a part of changing that history of Baltimore.”
Perhaps even more fundamentally, Bellamy says his experience with Requity, and his relationship with Rosenband, whom he calls “a really big, great inspiration,” have helped a formerly shy boy become a confident young man. “They really encouraged me a lot to where I (wanted to) step out there, take a lot more challenges that I wouldn't have done before socially,” he said.
The need for more hands on deck
Beyond Baltimore’s borders, there’s a lot of interest in helping young people like Bellamy embrace a future involving manual work.
“Requity in Baltimore, and organizations like them across the U.S., are doing innovative work to address both the 4.1 million construction skilled labor gap projected over the next decade and the rising cost of housing,” said Erin Izen, senior director of community investments at The Home Depot and executive director of The Home Depot Foundation, in an email exchange with USA TODAY.
“The shortage of tradespeople isn't just an economic statistic – it’s a bottleneck to community resilience and impacts the entire housing and renovation market,'' Izen said. "When there aren’t enough plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and HVAC specialists, construction timelines stall and costs go up."
In support of those goals, Home Depot has committed tens of millions of dollars to train skilled tradespeople across the country, Izen said.
Yet for all the logic of this career path for young men like Bellamy and Johnson, there may be some discomfort about encouraging young men of color from less-privileged backgrounds to put themselves to work in jobs that may be more physically demanding – even more dangerous – than desk jobs.
“Candidly, you know, if you hear white businesspeople saying, you don't need a college degree, I'm looking at that and saying, well, you talking about your kids?” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “You know, you're not the correct messenger because people are going to think, oh, you're just trying to steer us.”
Despite that caveat, Morial praises programs like Requity, and preaches “post-secondary success” of all kinds, whether it’s four-year college, two-year college, the military, the trades, or something else.
Before taking the helm of the Urban League, Morial served as mayor of New Orleans, where he’d grown up, a career path very similar to that of Baltimore's mayor.
But even before that, Morial started his working life as a construction laborer at 19. He remembers looking around at men in their 40s and 50s who were still doing the physical work, never having had a chance to move up. That’s key for programs like Requity, Morial says: “to make sure that the kids are getting into long-term careers in construction, plumbing, electrical, technical – not just being a laborer.”
Even more critical, he told USA TODAY, is to make sure every young person is able to make informed decisions about what’s best for their own personal situation. “I think the key thing is choice,” Morial said. “I think we should not be running around saying to people, you don't need a college degree. We should say, you need a career pathway that fits your interest and your skills.”
Pride 'seeing him kind of coming into his own'
Carl Bellamy is the founder and CEO of NU Level Entertainment (Never Under-rated), a hiphop recording label focused on community development efforts. He’s also Justin's dad.
Justin has “always been gifted,” his father told USA TODAY, but he was introverted and shy, and also struggled a bit in the shadow of an older brother with special needs. With Requity’s help, he’s blossomed.
“I have the joy of seeing him just come out of his shell, being able to vocally express himself, being able to do interviews, to be on camera, and especially the work that he does with the construction,” Carl Bellamy said. “Now that he does things in his own caliber, or at his own pace, we connect more as he's grown up to be an adult... it's more of a humbling experience for me, but exciting at the same time, seeing that he's kind of coming into his own.”
Building on successes like that, Rosenband is hoping to roll out the Requity model in other cities in the future.
"I think people just need a sense of purpose and affirmation, like, you matter," he said. "If kids like these have the right resources around them, there's no telling where they could go."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: In Baltimore, a nonprofit gives young people hope — and a path forward
Source: “AOL Money”
