Jon Smeton, Mayor's Office of Employment Development

Jon's Fellowship:

As a Baltimore Corps Fellow, I am working at the Baltimore City Mayor's Office of Employment Development and primarily coordinating the Regional Skills Training Center for Excellence and providing administrative support for the Baltimore Workforce Investment Board.

Background:

After moving to the city for school, I quickly fell in love with Baltimore's passion, quirkiness and charm. Deciding that I couldn't leave the city after graduation, I became an AmeriCorps volunteer conducting community outreach, educating youth, and coordinating volunteers for an energy conservation non-profit.

Why do you choose to live and work in Baltimore?  

Baltimore is not a tourists' city. It is a city of unique, beautiful, charming, wonderful people who are all connected in making it a better place in a subtle subconscious way. It is a city where a talk about the prison-industrial complex can happen in one neighborhood and a Jeff Goldblum-themed water ballet in the next one over at the same time. It is a city that cultivates not just dreamers, but do-ers, people who ignore the constraints that society has put upon them, because in Baltimore anyone can be somebody, because in Baltimore, everybody already is somebody. I feel like this city isn't just a place I live, but slowly becoming a part of my identity. To live anywhere else, would be to live without one of the pieces of myself that I am most proud of.

What's one surprising fact about yourself?  

One of my biggest fears is time-travel paradoxes (see Looper for more details/nightmares).

Go-to snack? 

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream from Turkey Hill or Goldfish Crackers