West Baltimore Mothers Build Sisterhood at RISE Family Support Center

Tracy Barnes was still processing the death of her mother when she first walked through the doors at RISE Early Learning and Family Support Center on Madison Avenue. She needed childcare. She found something closer to family.

"I had just lost my mom, so that's how I found RISE, and ever since I came it's just been like a community, a sisterhood," Barnes said.

Her experience captures what separates RISE from a conventional daycare. The center, housed in a converted office building at 940 Madison Ave. in Upton/Druid Heights, serves families with children from birth to 48 months and provides free childcare alongside referrals to health and social services and workforce development supports. But the mothers there say the peer network is what sustains them.

"We're just different people, but we all basically deal with the same thing, deal with the same traumas, deal with the same problems," Barnes said. "Anything you can name, you mention it to them and they will help out in every aspect of your life," added Sherina Jones, whose daughter Kehlani attends the center.

The need is acute. A citywide early childhood landscape analysis found that regulated childcare was available for roughly 48% of Baltimore children under five, but only 12% of infants under two. In Upton/Druid Heights, one of the city's most economically stressed communities, that shortfall falls hardest on precisely the families RISE was built to serve.

Most families find the center the way Barnes did: through word of mouth, a conversation at the Druid Hill Park pool, a neighbor's referral. Families seeking enrollment can contact RISE director Tyrone Roper. The center runs Monday through Thursday and co-locates B'More for Healthy Babies and Family Connections Baltimore within the same building.

"For us, whatever needs families have, we work with them to provide it," said Leslie Lewis Anthony, a staff member at the center.

RISE is overseen by the University of Maryland School of Social Work's Center for Restorative Change. For city policymakers and funders, it represents a live argument that wraparound investment, combining early learning, health, and peer support under one address, produces outcomes that single-service programs cannot. Whether RISE stays a one-building operation on Madison Avenue or becomes a replicable model for West Baltimore's other underserved neighborhoods may ultimately come down to whether sustained funding follows the evidence.