Our Story

Open Door America (ODA), formerly Open Door Baltimore, is challenging the status quo of intergenerational poverty in inner-city America and surrounding communities. Working in partnership with individuals, businesses, nonprofit agencies, and faith-based organizations, ODA seeks to alter the American poverty landscape by focusing on young parents over an extended period of time. No quick fixes for social or political purposes. No dumbed-down solutions for easy metrics. Instead, a future in which highly-motivated 21-to-35-year-olds complete their educations, clean up their past mistakes, learn to compete in the workforce, and assume the mantle of leadership within their families and communities.

Our organizing principle after nine years at the front lines in Baltimore is simple and straightforward: inner-city poverty and its attendant failure and chaos will never be ameliorated until an inspired brigade of young indigenous leaders and “leader families” are raised up as role models in the classroom, workforce, and home front. Until older brothers can show younger brothers a better way than “life on the corner,” until children are raised by dads who go to work each morning and return home each evening, and until neighborhood parks are kept safe by moms and dads who “own” the block, the downward cycle of poverty, arrest, re-arrest, and more poverty, will continue unabated for as far as the eye can see. In entrenched poverty settings like America’s inner cities, it ultimately comes down to local leadership. ODA understands that even the best-intentioned external efforts have lasting value only when they contribute to internal solutions.

Our experience shows that the indispensable additive for such progress to take root is “living wage” employment. Paying your way is basic to living in a material world. Until parents can adequately provide for themselves and their children all other assistance and support is mere window dressing. Until poor families have a real shot at upward mobility and sustainable independence, our best national efforts will always seem amorphous and illusory. The failure of American poverty initiatives over the past half-century – 146 federal poverty programs in 2013, including 47 just focused on job training – bears this out.

Because “living wage” employment is the key, Open Door America is focused on teaming high-end employers and their “life trajectory” jobs with carefully-screened workers who see the big picture, but who may need a little help reaching the first step on the ladder to success. We coach our clients to pull on the “American dream,” to make it their own, and in the end, make it better for all of us. In the process, we make it our business to find the best employers, screen the right workers, and put them together in the same picture frame.

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