Vision

Economic equity, viability, and quality of life for all communities in the Baltimore metropolitan region, anchored in a collective regional understanding and commitment.

Major Goals

1. To expand strategically organized, regionwide support for regional vision and problem-solving strategies and demonstrate that support to political leaders.

2. To achieve, through citizen engagement and direct technical and political intervention, reforms in both the processes and the outcomes of regional transportation policy, planning, and investment - bringing them into synchrony with principles of Smart Growth, job access, equity of opportunity, environmental quality, and community life.

3. To win passage in the Maryland General Assembly of revenue-growth-sharing legislation that establishes principles of and mechanisms for addressing the region's priority needs through pooling and allocation of certain regional revenue-growth funds.

4. With the Campaign for Regional Solutions a potential nucleus, to determine best long-term structure, functions, direction, and "home" of an organizational center of regional policy reform and citizen action in the Baltimore region.

Activities

• Communicate with and engage prospective coalition partners - community associations; institutions; faith-based, environmental, business, and civic organizations; key individuals and constituencies - in each jurisdiction of the region, with emphasis on older communities (particularly, but not exclusively, in city and first-ring suburbs).
• Generate a variety of ongoing mechanisms and materials for sustaining that communication and engagement - publications, forums and workshops, action-alerts, newsletter, testimony, up-to-date Web site.
• Continue to monitor, critique, spotlight, work with, and press Baltimore's metropolitan planning organization (the Transportation Steering Committee) at the Baltimore Metropolitan Council on the substance and processes of its transportation planning and investment decisions. Mobilize citizens at large to be participate actively at every opportunity during those decisions, and to push for more authentic opportunities.
• Meet with elected officials and other policy makers throughout the region to make the case and determine their requirements for support of specific regional reforms.
• Continue to research and document the gaps between existing needs for access/mobility and existing transportation options.
• Develop and mobilize a strong, informed, active constituency - including the newly formed Transit Riders League of Metropolitan Baltimore -- in behalf of public transportation that meets the mobility needs of the entire region.
• Convene city and county community leaders in a series of dialogues and workshops through which issues of common concern can be identified and addressed, and their sources understood, in a regional context.
• Work with residents and institutions of Mondawmin community and local/state/federal agencies to develop model transit hub at Mondawmin Transit Center.
• Continue to create opportunities to integrate CPHA's regional perspective and neighborhood work.

Volunteer Opportunities

• Join us! Work with people from the city and counties in a Campaign for Regional Solutions to secure long-term stability, equity, and vitality for the region and its communities.
• Let us know others with whom we should be communicating. And let us know how we can help you encourage your organization(s) to become active partners in the Campaign. Call us for information, materials, guest speakers, video tapes. Participate in our next "training class" for people interested in learning to have conversations or make presentations about regional issues.
• Join the Transit Riders League to push for improved transit funding, services, and planning.
• Monitor and report on meetings of pertinent public policy-making agencies whose decisions have regionwide impacts.
• Help maintain the Campaign web site, produce publications, plan conferences and events.
• Be part of an e-mail and telephone network to communicate information and action-alerts as issues and points of intervention develop and constituencies need to mobilize.