Lisa Fimiani traveled to Baltimore in June to attend the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) Quarterly Meeting, which was organized and led by Dr. Michele Romolini. One of the goals of Lisa’s site visit was to meet collaborators and tour sites of CURes’ work in Baltimore, where Michele serves as a member of the Leadership Team of BES, one of the longest running urban ecology studies in the country.
On June 18, BES Leadership Team member and CURes collaborator Terris King II took Michele and Lisa on a tour of locations where his organization is working with others to establish the Baltimore Forest School model. A former Kindergarten teacher turned social entrepreneur, Terris founded Temple X Schools with the intent to eradicate disparities in access to nature and pathways to public health, starting with the 79,000 children in Baltimore City Public Schools. His and others’ tireless advocacy for the Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights (COBOR) led to Baltimore’s City Council formally adopting it as policy in April 2026.
Our field day started at Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School, where the National League of Cities was holding an all-day summit on Early Childhood Success. Terris, Lisa, and Michele attended the opening panel where Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Council members discussed leadership and the role of fathers and male family members as essential partners in early childhood outcomes. The recent adoption of the COBOR was mentioned, as were other innovative initiatives underway in the City to support children.
Terris then led Lisa and Michele to several West Baltimore community-based weather stations, which were put into place through a partnership with the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and 53 participating schools, faith-based institutions, and other site partners (Waugh et al. 2026). The stations collect hourly measurements of temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind, and sunlight, and are intended to combat “data deserts” often found in communities vulnerable to environmental extremes such as heat and flooding, as well as socioeconomic disadvantages such as low income, high crime, and legacies of exclusionary and racist policies such as redlining that still have impacts today.
One of the locations visited was Belmont Elementary, with its small blacktop recreation area surrounded by a tall fence separating the school from Gwynns Falls Leakin Park—a 1,200 acre forested public green space. Terris shared that his father attended Belmont and did not know a forest was literally next door to his school, and that recent efforts to weed the chain link fence between properties revealed the forest beyond. This story was common to other locations visited, where the green spaces and nearby nature are often, through perception or reality, inaccessible, unsanitary, or unsafe for Baltimore’s children, depriving many young people in underserved communities the known benefits that nature provides.
We discussed Los Angeles-Baltimore collaborative proposals in development, including the establishment of the Baltimore Forest School model in Los Angeles. Through a network of partnerships and low-cost instrumentation, the model utilizes public and private land near schools as outdoor classrooms. A large, wooded property adjacent to Belmont showed both the opportunity and challenges of this effort. The land, owned by a local church, could provide a safe passageway into the forest. However, its location at the end of a street also created a convenient dumping ground for construction debris, tires, and various junk. While standing there, the group was approached by a local neighborhood advocate, who told us about his frustrations with the city’s rules and lack of responsiveness that prevent effective, continuous, and reliable maintenance and upkeep, and why he posts on social media and expresses his concerns hosting a radio show to provoke change in a city that has great potential.
In the afternoon, Michele and Lisa visited Camp Small and learned about a project that was started by one person hired to solve another dumping problem and has grown into a successful national model for urban wood recycling. Managed by the Forestry Division within Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks, Camp Small is the sorting and recycling facility for the 9,000 tons of tree debris that is collected annually from city-owned street and park trees. The urban wood recycling program utilizes onsite processing equipment such as sawmills and drying kilns to transform the materials into lumber, firewood, furniture, and other valuable wood products. But in the beginning, it was also the dump site for washing machines and metal parts, with no vision on how wood products could be re-purposed and made of value to the community. Yard master Shaun Preston and Nick Oster, a former woodshop teacher, developed that vision. “When I first started, there was no plan, no equipment, no building,” says Preston, who arrived in 2016 with Camp Small’s launch by the Rec & Parks Urban Forestry Division and the City’s Office of Sustainability.” Now, the wood gets a second life and even brings in revenue for the City. Partnering with local nonprofits, Camp Small also provides teaching, training and job opportunities to the City’s youth, as was observed by Michele and Lisa, meeting a lovely student attending one of the local universities.
The previous day’s BES Quarterly Meeting and the visits with collaborating partners in Baltimore were so inspiring for Michele and Lisa, as we further develop bicoastal research collaborations with CURes’ Los Angeles and Baltimore partners. Indeed, through submitted or in-development funding proposals, CURes is poised to expand our research collaborations with the two longest running urban ecology sites—Baltimore and Phoenix. Continuing to lean into trusted, long-term partnerships is appropriate and timely, as the current funding atmosphere can be daunting, while the urgency for this work does not subside.
CURes Executive Director, Dr. Eric Strauss put it succinctly;
“The work of our Centers on both coasts is essential to maintaining our capacity and leadership in the area of urban ecology. The Baltimore program which has been going on for decades and is the intellectual cornerstone of our understanding of how urban resilience can be shaped and nurtured. Having a footprint in both Baltimore and Los Angeles allows us to be more effective as a team and to develop deep collaborations that can enhance the work in both cities”.
As CURes celebrates our 15-year anniversary in Los Angeles, our Center can proudly say we have carried the urban ecology baton forward, and we are excited for the opportunities and successes our future collaborations will bring.