An innovative hub for five non-profit organizations serving the Baltimore community. Includes a hands-on volunteer experience.

What can you do with 25,000 square feet of unused warehouse space? Turn it into a hub of service providers for the city of Baltimore of course! Get a peek inside the innovative Baltimore Warehouse Collaborative and get firsthand experience volunteering with the nonprofit organizations that are housed there. Learn about how the Baltimore Collaborative Warehouse created shared office and warehouse space for five nonprofit organizations serving the Baltimore community in very different ways. Spend your afternoon sorting books with the Maryland Book Bank, packing bedtime kits with Bedtime in a Box, organizing supplies with Break a Difference, and shelving sports equipment with Leveling the Playing Field.

Leveling the Playing Field (LPF) is a nonprofit organization that gives underprivileged children the opportunity to enjoy the mental and physical benefits of youth sports participation. LPF does this through the collection of used/excess sports equipment from schools, manufacturers, individual families, and others. After being inventoried and sorted at the LPF warehouse, the equipment is then redistributed to a school, sports league, or other organization serving a low-income community and placed into the hands of a child who cannot afford their own equipment.

The Maryland Book Bank is committed to cultivating literacy in children from under resourced neighborhoods. Since 2014, we have distributed over one million books to children, teachers, and families in Baltimore and beyond.

Bedtime in a Box, a nonprofit organization, is a creative but simple intervention that provides books and other bedtime materials to families, linking these materials to a nightly routine, prompting multiple positive effects on health and education. Every Box not only prepares children for school, but also builds connections between adult and child, promoting healthy early social and emotional development and regular sleeping habits. We partner with existing educational and healthcare organizations to distribute our Boxes to low-income families.

Break A Difference’s (B•A•D) mission is to strategically engage individuals and institutions through service to make positive impacts in communities and in those who serve. As a nonprofit, we accomplish this by engaging corporations in large-scale service projects, preparing skilled leaders to serve on nonprofit boards, expanding the volunteer service capacity for nonprofits, and partnering with organizations to engage college students in week-long immersive service trips, otherwise known as Alternative Breaks. Our project goals are tailored to the needs of the community organizations with which we partner, ranging from weeks-long disaster recovery deployments to single-day activities such as donation assembly for transitional housing nonprofits.