Eva Wingren, Baltimore Community Foundation

Eva's Fellowship:

As a Community Investment Fellow with the Baltimore Community Foundation, Eva will be helping BCF with a grantmaking activities as well as a number of special projects, including implementing portions of a race/equity/inclusion work plan and conducting an analysis of strengths, gaps, and opportunities in civic leadership institutions in Baltimore. 

The Baltimore Community Foundation is a philanthropic foundation created by and for the people of Greater Baltimore, where many donors join together to make the region they love a better place, today and for future generations. Unlike a family foundation, community foundations can accept donations and both fund and perform advocacy. In addition to managing donor-advised funds, BCF invests in education and neighborhoods.

Background:

Eva comes to Baltimore from Washington, DC where she spent five years working on federal affordable housing and homelessness policy and advocacy. She believes that the best policy comes from understanding the reality on the ground, and she was attracted to Baltimore's openness to experimentation to solve entrenched urban problems. She is active with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a movement for white people to practice allyship toward the Movement for Black Lives, and Resource Generation, which organizes young people with access to wealth to use their wealth to further social and racial justice aims. Questions of money and funding are some of the hardest to answer in policymaking, and Eva is looking forward to building on her knowledge of housing finance to tackle these tough questions. Her hobbies include sailing, blues dance, and biking.

Why do you choose to live and work in Baltimore?  

As DC gets more expensive, Baltimore is becoming the go-to destination for cutting edge arts and culture, so I found myself having fantastic experiences whenever I visited. There is also a lot of attention being paid to whether it's possible to do gentrification "right," improving communities while not displacing people, and Baltimore has been able to test some really innovative stuff. I have also run a mentorship program before and was intrigued by Baltimore Corps' leadership development model.

What's one surprising fact about yourself?  

I used to live on an island with no stoplights or chain stores.

Go-to snack? 

Bagel and cream cheese