2012 was a storybook baseball season for Carver Vocational-Technical High School. Michael Rosenband, the varsity baseball coach, had recently moved from New York to Baltimore to coach in the city — despite his friend in Baltimore telling him “there’s no field, there’s no budget, and a lot of the young people are going to be putting equipment in their hands for the very first time.”
That team saw a run in the state playoffs, and Rosenband witnessed many of the students start stepping into who they really wanted to become.
But while they were succeeding on the baseball field, the students were facing bigger challenges as they looked towards graduation. It was great that they figured out baseball, senior captain Sterling Hardy told Rosenband, but they weren’t getting jobs where they could use the trade skills they were learning at the vocational school.
“I’ve done all the things that have been asked of me, but there’s still no opportunity for me or for any of my friends, and we’re being told that there isn’t opportunity because we didn’t get real-world experience,” Hardy told Rosenband.
Just across the street from Carver, Hardy would see so many vacant houses on Presstman Street every time he got off the bus on the way to school. Why couldn’t the students “apply what we’re learning in our classroom, walk across the street, and start fixing up these houses?”
Requity was born from that drive to see better neighborhoods in Baltimore communities.
Each of Requity’s branching programs — from its construction arm rebuilding vacant houses, to its culinary arm that feeds the neighboring community, to its media arm that documents and celebrates the young people’s work — naturally led to the next.
They were all led by the young people who identified a need and figured out their own way to best meet that need with the mentorship and support of the adults who are dedicated to supporting new career pathways for young people in Baltimore.
While the students learn the technical skills at their vocational school to support career pathways in carpentry, masonry, electrical, manufacturing, food service, media production, graphic design, computer science, and so much more, Requity provides a platform for young people in Baltimore to explore those pathways in the real world, learning directly from the pros.
The nonprofit has now expanded to 10 schools in the city, including Edmondson-Westside High School, Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, and Digital Harbor High School.
In Baltimore, there are nearly 12,000 vacant houses — down from 16,000 in 2020 — and 20,000 vacant lots, which can primarily be found in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The city loses an estimated $200 million in expenses and tax revenue each year due to the prevalence of vacant properties, and as Mayor Brandon Scott makes progress on his $3 billion plan to restore vacant housing, there is still much more work to be done at the ground level.
Requity started addressing this challenge with one of the vacants that line the streets around Carver, and the team took on a six-year project to transform 2212 Presstman Street into Carver House, now a livable home for a family in the community.
On an overcast Friday afternoon in March this year, more than 100 members of the community — parents, teachers, board members, neighbors, and more — came out to support the grand unveiling and ribbon cutting at Carver House. Among them were the cycles of students and staff that each played a role in bringing this home to life, celebrating the tangible fruits of their labor.
The crowd on the 2100 block of Presstman Street was buzzing with anticipation — questions about what the remodeled house would look like, laughter at inside jokes between newfound friends, and gasps of astonishment with each reunion and “I haven’t seen you since…”
The crowd started at Requity’s headquarters just half a block down the street, where some of the student interns who had a direct hand in renovating the home proudly talked about the trade skills they developed, the life lessons they learned, and the relationships they made throughout their work on the house.
With freshly repainted steps and porch rails, staining on the columns to highlight the natural wood grain, and a crisp white fascia that gave the rowhome a modern look, the renovated house shined like a trophy, a testament to the years of work the students put into it. Blue and white balloons adorned the walkway to the house, and a crowd of student interns and Requity staff gathered on the porch to speak to the community members that came to celebrate the day. Rosenband, founder and executive director of Requity, expressed gratitude for the community’s support, and for the contractors who worked alongside the student interns to rebuild the house and taught them “purpose and patience.”
“When you have resources, support, and encouragement while you’re solving problems around something you care about, you learn, and you learn fast,” Rosenband said. “You start to see crisis as opportunity; you identify what you need and you solve it.”
“When you have resources, support, and encouragement while you’re solving problems around something you care about, you learn, and you learn fast,” Rosenband said.
“You begin to see what’s possible, you self-actualize, and you ask bigger and bolder questions.”
City Council Member James Torrence, a Carver alumnus, said the city has been working to make it easier for community developers like Requity to renovate vacant properties by acquiring requested interim eligible properties within a four-month process, and then quickly getting the local developers the land disposition agreement so they can start working on the vacant properties. This was the process for rehabilitating the vacant housing around the new Parkview Recreation Center at the former Westside Elementary School, he said.
“I saw what happened when traditionally Black neighborhoods were disinvested,” Torrence said. “I know what it’s like for my neighbor sitting next door to a vacancy, you can’t get any insurance on your house because of the vacant property.”
“We’re trying to end that blight, but also create investment and equity in the Black neighborhoods and all the neighbors who remain, but also doing it in a way that my friends and family who make $20 an hour can afford to live and stay in the city at the same time.”
Tackling a systemic challenge like this is much easier said than done, Rosenband said at the ribbon cutting, and he spent some years getting deeply acquainted with the nonprofit space so he’d know how to generate enough resources to sustain the budding program. In 2020, Rosenband and Hardy officially launched Requity, hoping to break down the barriers between vocational education and job placement.
They acquired the house at 2212 Presstman Street shortly afterward and faced no shortage of challenges along the way, from permitting to time constraints that often led to the staff and student apprentices working through lunch so they could get enough of the real-world experience they couldn’t get from the classrooms.
To keep the students fed and to build on their mission to break down experiential barriers, Rosenband brought in Bria Evans, a chef he met through an Open Society Institute cohort, to lead what soon became a culinary arm of Requity. The culinary interns from Carver soon started We All Eat Wednesdays, where they would plan and prepare meals in the small Carver House kitchen and then package and deliver to the neighboring community at no cost.
The culinary program, not wanting to solely rely on grant funding, also started a catering business selling grilled burgers and hot dogs, potato chips, sodas, and even snowballs at nearly 40 events around the city. In 2025 alone, they generated more than $30,000, funding that all goes back into the program and further supporting the students.
At the Carver House grand opening, the culinary students ran a refreshment station, offering the various sandwiches they prepared to the crowded room of visitors touring the new space. Requity culinary instructor Courtney Roane was standing nearby, jokingly encouraging the somewhat shy teens to keep their hands out of their pockets and to keep greeting people with enthusiasm.
Next to them, students and staff in full Requity-branded gear ran a merch table that featured student-designed t-shirts and hoodies for sale. When We All Eat Wednesdays started taking off, the students realized they needed to not only look more uniform to represent their organization in the community, but also needed creative methods for sharing their story and uplifting the work they were doing through photo and video content creation. Requity’s media and business arms now make merchandise for other local organizations too, like HWC Construction and Johns Hopkins University. The students also offer photography and video editing services that people can book online.
In the freshly unveiled Carver House, there were photos along the walls that showed how the student interns gutted the boarded-up vacant house and the hand they had in each part of the construction, from the carpentry interns restoring a bay window on the second floor to the masonry interns applying VISCONN to the stone foundation to create an air barrier that fills any gaps in the house.
Shawn White Jr. joined Requity his freshman year after being on Rosenband’s baseball team; he was looking for a job, and seeing that his coach had a program available, he “put himself out there” and got it. White described hard days juggling schoolwork, baseball, and track while doing masonry in Carver House and in the Requity headquarters down the street. He’s currently deciding between going for his CDL or staying within the construction field and building upon what he learned through Requity and working in HVAC or service maintenance.
Throughout his years with Requity, White embraced being a sponge and learning as much as he could while he was actively part of something bigger than himself.
“Building this house since freshman year is like full circle seeing the things that are being able to be done, especially coming from the first group,” White said. “Looking at the house, it’s like, ‘Wow, we did it.’”
Jashua Tibbs was also part of the first construction cohort at Requity in 2020, laying the foundation for Carver House both figuratively and literally. He had a hand in installing the floor joists and creating the back wall for the new deck in the backyard. Even after completing his time with Requity as a student, he’s still actively involved in the organization, supporting everything from transportation to mentorship for the newer cohorts of students. Tibbs said he was most proud of getting his OSHA 30 certification and his CDL Class B through Requity, and he’s looking forward to pursuing his CDL Class A next.
“I want people to know that no matter what you want to do in life, you can do it,” Tibbs said. “No matter if you want to start off doing construction and change, or if you’re starting off doing media, and you want to do construction, anything is possible.”
Now that the house is complete, the goal for Requity is to pass ownership of Carver House to Tibbs and his mother, and the nonprofit is exploring different pathways through Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore to make that happen. In the meantime, Requity is starting work on a few other properties on Presstman Street and Poplar Grove Street, finishing smaller neighborhood projects like porch repairs and supporting home maintenance for elderly community members. They’re also expanding their workshops so more people within the community can learn tips and tricks from and alongside the student interns.
Back at the grand opening of Carver House, visitors squeezed past each other to get a closer look at the new construction’s finer details, from the crisp paint on the walls to the new tiling in the bathroom.
DJ Fleming, strategy support manager at Requity, was bouncing from room to room, greeting visitors and making sure the event went off without a hitch. He joined Requity after Carver House construction began, so even though he’s only seen photos and videos of the original property, walking through the transformed space still felt “pretty surreal.”
“I’m just overwhelmed by the amount of people who have been here to show support for Requity and be a part of the celebration of the work that the kids have done,” Fleming said. “The fact that we can talk about that, show that, and even have students up there is really fantastic, and show that this has been like a labor of community and a labor of love.”
“I want the community to feel the real, like, truth, and the pride that this house came from students’ hands … the abilities and the potential, those things are all there within the grasp of young folks in the city.”
This story is published as part of the Baltimore News Collaborative, a project exploring the challenges and successes experienced by young people in Baltimore. The collaborative is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.