Making Miles! is made up of a group of friends whose journeys have taken them away from Baltimore and back again. A number of them attended Baltimore School for the Arts for high school, meeting the others through various events during the same informative years. In creating art together they found special bonds and learned that they were a good team. College came and many of them left Baltimore, going as far away as Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon, Washington State, and traveling outside the States to places like Madagascar, Thailand and Germany, or traveling across the United States by both car and train.
In the end, each of the Making Miles! team decided to come back to their hometown of Baltimore. They are all following different paths – one is training to be a horticulturalist, one is a theater technician, one is in law school, one an upholsterer, one active in community development, and one in health care policy – but they are all together again and back in “the greatest city in America,” their hometown, Baltimore.
They decided they wanted to work together again. Despite their divergent interests, they have a common desire to make their hometown better – and have fun while doing it! They decided to adopt a small lot at the end of Miles Avenue in the neighborhood of Remington. The lot is adjacent to the railroad tracks and next to an abandoned and deteriorating building, and there is a lot of dumping, squatting, and rodent problems as a result. Through the Adopt-a-Lot process they are acquiring the rights to “adopt” the city vacant lot, and they have already obtained the permission of a private owner of a second vacant lot on the site.
They plan to build at least five raised beds on one side of the lot and place a bench with a shade garden where there is already a tree present on the other side. Through the Mayor’s Power in Dirt initiative they plan to have mulch delivered once the beds are built so that no weeds will grow in between and so there will be a defined path through the garden. They will utilize the City’s new water service to water the garden. Each bed will have a different theme – one may be a salad bed, there may be a flower bed, and a roots vegetable bed. Two of the raised beds will serve as garden plots for individual members of the team because these members do not have back yards at their places of residence. The Making Miles! garden will be an extension of their homes.
The Making Miles! team is a group of smart, capable, active, and concerned young people who have returned to Baltimore City where they grew up to make their lives. As they make themselves into the people they want to be, as they make their futures in the place in which they grew up, that want to make progress, make Baltimore a better place…they want to Make Miles! Created by Anna Evans-Goldstein
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