KEYS Empowers hosts West Baltimore cookout with groceries for families

The smell of barbecue and the beat from a DJ framed a more urgent mission in West Baltimore: making sure children did not go hungry once school meals went off the table for summer. KEYS Empowers hosted its cookout and food distribution at 1511 Ashburton Street, pairing a neighborhood gathering with groceries for families and meal support for children.

The event ran from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and was designed as a welcome, not a handoff. Mujahid Muhammad, the nonprofit’s founder and a Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners member, said each child would receive a backpack of food staples and easy-to-prepare meal kits. KEYS expected to serve roughly 200 families at the kickoff, a scale that underscored both the immediate need and the limits of a single distribution.

Muhammad said he had gone door to door to let neighbors know about the cookout, an outreach effort aimed at West Baltimore blocks where the summer break can quickly become a hunger gap. Baltimore City and Maryland both operate official summer meal programs for children 18 and younger, but school-based registration for summer programs had a deadline of Friday, May 22, leaving community groups to fill the space between school calendars and the daily needs of families. Baltimore City’s materials describe its summer food program as free breakfasts and lunches in low-income areas, while the state says its Summer Food Service Program provides free meals when school is not in session. Families can also use the USDA Summer Meals Site Finder to locate nearby meal sites, hours and contact information.

The cookout also doubled as a preview of KEYS’ larger plans. Muhammad said the organization wants the event to help shape the future KEYS Community Healing Village, a project intended to address trauma and provide non-traditional emotional, social and mental-health support. The long-term vision includes year-round food support for as many as 300 families per day, along with workforce development, early education and after-school programming.

For KEYS, the Saturday turnout was part service delivery and part civic test. The group says it has already distributed about 75,034 pounds of food, hosted 182 families through Culinary Therapy during COVID-19 and served more than 2,329 participants in physical fitness activities. That record speaks to the breadth of the need around West Baltimore, where the hunger gap is not a seasonal inconvenience but a recurring pressure point that schools alone cannot solve. Feeding America estimates 31,820 children in Baltimore city were food insecure in 2021, with a child food insecurity rate of 26.2% and an annual food budget shortfall of $64,796,000.