About Us

 

The Baltimore Regional Initiative Developing Genuine Equality (BRIDGE) is a vehicle for change and social justice in the Baltimore metropolitan region. It is a nonprofit, interfaith organization of geographically, racially, and economically diverse congregations from Baltimore City and Baltimore, Anne Arundel, Howard, Harford, and Carroll counties. Members of BRIDGE, currently representing over 20 congregations and faith-based organizations with over 20,000 people, have come together in a new understanding of the challenges facing their communities. They recognize that sprawl development; investment and disinvestment patterns; stark concentrations of poverty and racial segregation in the urban core; and deep regional disparities in tax base, educational quality, housing choices, employment, economic opportunity, and transportation access that they are witnessing have been driven and subsidized by 50 years of public policies and allocations of public resources.

The faith communities of BRIDGE are working together -- using relationship building, faith-based organizing, and leadership-development training -- to create an ever more powerful people's organization capable of ensuring that the region's poor and disenfranchised have a voice at the public decision-making tables that shape their lives. The ultimate objective is to reverse regional and state policies that create, promote, or perpetuate social, racial, and economic inequities. BRIDGE will span the gulf between the region's marginalized people and places and the region's structures of social and economic opportunity.