Hours after defeating the Buffalo Bills, the Ravens turned their focus toward impacting the community.
Ravens President Sashi Brown and current players Roquan Smith, Kyle Hamilton, Marcus Williams, and Josh Ross met with Roca Baltimore program members on Monday to address the challenges young men face growing up in Baltimore.
The Ravens have entered a five-year (2024-28) partnership with Roca, which includes a $300,000 investment to support the organization's Baltimore City location.
Established in 2018, Roca Baltimore's mission is to be a relentless force in disrupting incarceration, poverty, and racism by engaging young adults, police, and systems at the center of urban violence.
"At the Ravens, we talk a lot about our work in the community and how important that is, and how it's critical for us to use our platform for the most important things," Brown said. "I think we recognize that gun violence across this country has been a plague. We are at a crisis, and particularly in inner cities that crisis is largely being ignored.
"We wanted to take this head on. We know that we don't have the answers. But finding organizations like Roca that are on the frontlines of this vital, life-saving work was really important for us and heartwarming for us."
Ravens Director of Player Engagement Jameel McClain and former wide receiver Torrey Smith were also in attendance Monday to meet with Roca program members and share their experience and insight.
"To have players here with Roca staff and young people is nothing shy of remarkable and amazing," said Kurtis Palermo, Executive Vice President for Roca Maryland. "To be able to sit in a room with these athletes who they look at as heroes and talk about very personal things is an experience they probably wouldn't have had if we hadn't started partnering with the Ravens in this way."
Roca wants to address trauma, find hope, and drive change, and the donation and partnership with the Ravens will help them do so.
"We work with 16 to 24-year-old young men who are at an acute elevated risk of either being the victims, or perpetrators, of gun violence," Palermo said. "We lose so many young men to incarceration or homicide. You can keep doing things that put you in harm's way, or you can choose to do something different.
"The partnership with the Ravens is unique to our work in Baltimore. This grant will bring more job slots for the young men who show up every morning at 7:30 wanting to work. Investments like this from the Ravens organization allows us to do that."
Since 2016, the Ravens have donated over $16 million to local organizations promoting social justice reform, while encouraging their players to be at the forefront of change.
"Our love and belief in this Baltimore community is real," Brown said. "That filters down to every individual, particularly those that come from some of the areas and circumstances that are often forgotten and hardest to engage with. This is a great partnership for us, an opportunity for us to show that no one's forgotten here at the Ravens."
