Before a Ravens game in 2022, Team President Sashi Brown met Doretha Brogden, the mother of Jeremiah Brogden, a 17-year-old Mervo High School student and football player who had recently been tragically shot and killed.
That moment stuck with Brown, who was in his first year as team president. Ravens Owner Steve Bisciotti had already asked him and other organization leaders to engage deeply with community impact work in Baltimore.
Brown knew then that the Ravens had to take on one of the largest issues facing Baltimore and toughest to solve: gun violence.
"Hugging his mom out on that field, you could feel the searing pain," Brown said Tuesday.
"Can we really honor our mission and the charge that Steve has given us and sit idly by when we're seeing gun violence at that time affecting 200-300 families in our community?"
On Tuesday, the Ravens announced a $1 million investment into six local and national organizations working to prevent gun violence during a violence prevention summit at M&T Bank Stadium, an event supported by the Ravens as part of the contribution.
A year before Jeremiah's death, Mayor Brandon Scott charted a new path forward in addressing gun violence in Baltimore. The number of homicides in 2019 was 328. When Scott said he wanted to drop that number by 15% every year, people in the room laughed out loud. They thought it was impossible.
"We knew the decades of zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration had not made Baltimore safer, and that only through a community-led, data-driven, comprehensive approach could we see a drop and see the lasting change we wanted to see," Scott said.
Five years later, Baltimore recorded its fewest homicides in nearly 50 years – 133. Homicides and non-fatal shootings are down 60% since 2021.
That isn't happenstance. It's the result of investment and partnership, and the Ravens are helping move the ball forward.
"There isn't a more important piece of work that the community is engaged in right now than saving lives of predominantly youth in our city," Brown said. "We embrace that fully. Here at the Ravens, we believe in doing the right things for the right reasons, even if they are hard."
The Ravens have long been part of Baltimore's playbook for making a difference, especially for youth. Since 2016, the Ravens organization has contributed more than $37 million to social justice initiatives while encouraging players and staff to be active partners in community change.
When it came to gun violence, Brown said the Ravens had to educate themselves and have many conversations about the best way to engage as a football team.
"We know we're not the experts in this space, but we know it's a critical issue for us to be working towards and in support of," Brown said. "We show up with [by] convening folks, including some of our corporate partners and colleagues across the city, but also with our dollars. We put our money where our mouth is."
The Baltimore Together: A Violence Prevention Summit at M&T Bank Stadium was a key next step, bringing together leaders in the field to discuss prevention, crisis response and long-term recovery strategies.
"Having these types of resources allows us to think about how we invest upstream within our community to form partnerships that can help in the conversation around how we drive prevention rather than just focusing on the treatment of gun violence," said Mohan Suntha, President and Chief Executive Officer of the University of Maryland Medical System.
"If you can bring people with varying perspectives to the table and communicate, and understand where are the opportunities, where are the gaps, and where are the problems that need to be solved through collaboration, that's a foundational game changer."
While great strides have been made, the work isn't done. Getting more people and organizations to lean in on finding solutions is part of the mission.
"Every single homicide that we did not have is a community not dealing with trauma, a family not dealing with trauma, is an individual who still has the opportunity to grow into the best version of themselves," Mayor Scott said.
"This progress is beyond anything that anyone outside of us could have imagined. But now it's up to us to keep going. What we did the past five years or even last year is not good enough for me. I want to win the Super Bowl every year."
The six grant recipients and their planned uses of funding are outlined below:
**The Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE)**: The funding supports technical assistance from the University of Pennsylvania's Crime and Justice Policy Lab to expand the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS). This research-backed model has already demonstrated significant success in Baltimore, reducing homicides and shootings by roughly one-third in the Western District.
MedStar Health's Hospital Violence Responder (HVR) Program: Funding provides emergency assistance to victims of gun violence, domestic violence and human trafficking treated at local MedStar hospitals to help cover costs for hotel stays, clothing, food and other essential needs. This support also expands community education efforts, including Stop the Bleed and Hands Only CPR training for students and a broader reach for gun violence prevention programming across Baltimore.
**Everytown for Gun Safety**: This investment will be used to finance a series of conflict resolution and gun violence prevention training tours across Baltimore high schools. This targeted investment successfully reached hundreds of local students, drove over 200 new grassroots volunteer sign-ups and generated nearly one million social media views to foster long-term safety within the community.
**Roca Maryland**: The Ravens' multi-year investment is used to advance Roca's evidence-based violence intervention work in Baltimore, where the organization currently serves more than 350 of the city's highest-risk young men annually. Roca's proven model combines relentless outreach, Rewire CBT – a non-clinical adaptation of cognitive-behavioral therapy – and transitional employment to help young people turn away from violence, heal trauma and accomplish long-term behavior change.
**University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center**: This investment has allowed Shock Trauma to create and host collaborative forums, such as the Baltimore Together Summit, which brings leaders from across the city, state, and federal government, healthcare, universities and community organizations together to foster stronger alignment of goals and help forge partnerships, leveraging each organization's unique strengths, perspectives and expertise toward long-term solutions.
**The Johns Hopkins Gun Violence Research Center**: This commitment supports the strategic expansion of the "This Is My Story" (TIMS) initiative across Johns Hopkins trauma units and the creation of the Johns Hopkins Medicine "Champions for Change" Fellowship, a paid leadership program that engages Baltimore youth impacted by violence in storytelling, advocacy and healing practices.
