By Jamye Wooten
For as long as I can remember, Black-led organizations in Baltimore have been doing extraordinary work with limited visibility, limited capital, and very little shared infrastructure to support them. From grassroots organizers and neighborhood nonprofits to mission-driven businesses and cultural workers, Black Baltimore has always generated solutions for itself. What we have not had, historically, is shared infrastructure that makes this ecosystem visible, connected and resourced at scale.
This is not accidental. It is the result of decades of disinvestment that treated Black social change as charity rather than as an essential part of the city’s economic life.
When we talk about economic development in Baltimore, the conversation often centers on large institutions, downtown corridors, or external investment. Far less attention is paid to the social economy – the network of nonprofits, social enterprises, creatives and mission-driven businesses that already create jobs, stabilize neighborhoods and meet needs that markets and governments routinely fail to address. In Black communities especially, this sector has long functioned as both a safety net and a growth engine, even while being systematically underfunded.
My work is rooted in advancing social and economic equity by strengthening what Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein coined as the Black social economy. Drawing on Dr. Hossein’s work alongside that of Dr. Elmer P. Martin and Dr. Joanne M. Martin, the Black social economy can be understood as the interconnected economic, social and cultural systems through which Black communities generate, circulate and steward resources in the face of systemic exclusion. Dr. Hossein names these systems as economic formations rooted in mutual aid, cooperation, and both informal and formal enterprise. The Martins, in turn, illuminate the Black helping tradition as the relational and spiritual infrastructure that sustains them. Together, their work reveals an economy grounded not only in exchange, but in moral responsibility, kinship, trust and collective survival.
Research helps put language and numbers to what many of us have experienced firsthand. A study by the Bridgespan Group and Echoing Green found that nonprofit organizations led by people of color have significantly smaller revenues and far fewer unrestricted assets than similarly situated White-led organizations. These disparities are not about talent or capacity. They are about access, visibility and trust, the conditions that shape how resources move.
But funding alone has never been the full story. Disinvestment is also structural. It shows up in how difficult it can be to locate Black-led organizations, how fragmentation is imposed on our networks, and how often groups are forced to compete rather than collaborate in the absence of shared infrastructure that supports the ecosystem as a whole.
Infrastructure tends to fade into the background when it works. Roads, broadband and utilities are rarely celebrated, but without them, economies stall. The same is true for the social economy. Without tools that help people find one another, understand what already exists, and build relationships across sectors, even the most well-intentioned investments will fall short.
This understanding is what led us to build CLLCTIVLY’s new digital platform, now live at https://cllctivly.org. It is not a marketplace, and it is not simply a directory. It is an effort to create shared infrastructure for Baltimore’s Black social economy, a digital home where mission-driven businesses, nonprofits, funders and community members can be visible to one another and begin to move as a connected system rather than as isolated efforts.
The platform will also serve as the digital home for CLLCTIVGive, grounding this infrastructure in a practice of collective giving that already mobilizes resources across Baltimore.
At the center of the platform is a People Directory that allows individuals across philanthropy, social impact, creative industries and civic life to share who they are, what they are building, and what they are seeking. Organizational profiles, initiatives and storytelling help surface the breadth of work already happening across the city. The intention is simple: to make it easier for people doing aligned work to find one another and build together.
The platform’s launch coincides with CLLCTIVLY’s Power of One campaign, which offers an early glimpse of what this kind of infrastructure can make possible. Through the campaign, artists, organizers and community members engage not as passive users, but as contributors. The result is not just content or visibility, but connection, people discovering one another, relationships forming, and pathways opening that did not previously exist.
This is what it looks like to move from disinvestment toward collective capacity.
None of this replaces the need for policy change or sustained funding. But it does address a gap that money alone cannot solve. Shared infrastructure is how individual acts of care and participation begin to add up to something durable.
Baltimore’s Black social economy deserves more than survival. It deserves systems that help it breathe, grow, and thrive. Building those systems is not only a moral imperative. It is an economic one.
The future of Baltimore will not be built by a single institution or investment. It will be shaped by networks of people choosing to see one another, support one another and build infrastructure that reflects our shared values. That work is already underway. The question now is whether we are willing to recognize it, resource it, and grow it together.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.