To clean up East Baltimore, this mentor shores up buildings – and youths

Munir Bahar, sitting erect and intensely focused, is a commanding presence in the crowd that’s come to see his latest crop of leadership graduates. Six young men – who came through tough streets in East Baltimore to be trained here to go right back out and improve their community – project the posture and confidence of their leader. Each takes the microphone to explain what they’ve learned in the 10-week course to foster character and leadership development at COR Health Institute.

“Every great leader follows or has followed another great leader,” observes Khyree Green, a 24-year-old who wandered into a COR trash-pickup event two years ago, spent the day watching and listening to Mr. Bahar walk his appealing talk of healthy citizenship, and followed him into this program of martial arts, fitness training, and civic engagement.

Three generations of leaders in this room illustrate the model the young man describes: Ademola Ekulona, elderly now, was the youth leader who tried to keep the young Mr. Bahar out of jail in the 1990s. He proudly watches his protégé’s protégés describe leadership lessons. They are lessons that seem to boil down to the hard work of disciplining themselves to stay calm with a boss at work, to take responsibility for and stick to a hard task like a long workout or getting good grades, and to just do the “right thing.” 

Mr. Green says his defining moment with COR was the day he was one of two young men left standing after grueling hill sprints with a medicine ball: “You learn discipline ... that day, right there, let me know that I was in it and I wanted to do it.” Now, in addition to holding down a job at a local gas company, he’s reading books and says he’s thinking more positively because of “big brother” Munir Bahar. And, likewise, Mr. Green led his own actual younger brother and fellow graduate, 19-year-old Phillip Brooks, into the transformational program.

COR – Committed, Organized, Responsible – is a “prevention-based” organization that aims to deter violence in an East Baltimore ZIP code that had 31 homicides last year. Surrounded by vacant properties and violence, COR enlists young residents to improve their neighborhood. In addition to community cleanups and food drives, COR kept watch last year to ensure the local protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis remained peaceful.

COR is all about creating “assets” – pillars of the community to hold it up, explains Mr. Bahar, who founded and runs the nonprofit.

“You have to literally change the infrastructure [and put in place] what I call community assets,” says Mr. Bahar, who speaks both of individual lives and the East Baltimore neighborhood he’s improving. The sparkling COR building, where the graduation ceremony was held, was rehabbed from the ruins of a liquor store and row houses by Mr. Bahar and neighborhood youth.

Since the COR team transformed the building into a gym and learning space in 2017, Mr. Bahar says there has been no gun violence on this block of North Collington Avenue.

“You teach them to look within themselves to find power,” says Mr. Bahar, a tax consultant by trade, whose passion is teaching the discipline of martial arts. “I can’t save them financially, I can’t give them a new house ... but if I can teach them to be stronger individuals, if I can teach them to be more faithful, more patient, more resilient individuals, then whatever the world may take them through, I’ll know they’ll be better off.”

Mr. Bahar has traveled this road himself.

“Help me with this boy”

Two blocks away from the institute is a church where – during the 1990s – the seeds of COR were planted in an after-school program called the Harambee Rites of Passage Kollective.

“[Munir’s] mother came in and said, ‘You gotta help me with this boy. He’s driving me crazy,’” recalls Mr. Ekulona, a Harambee facilitator at the time. 

By his own recollection, Mr. Bahar says, “I was bad as hell,” smoking, drinking, selling drugs, put out of school multiple times.

“We would have meetings about, ‘What are we going to do about Munir?’” says Mr. Ekulona, who recalls after-
school program staff saying, “He’s just wild.” 

“No,” Mr. Ekulona recalls responding. “[Munir’s] just telling us what he needs.”

Despite the best efforts of his mother and others, says Mr. Bahar, “from 13 to 20 years old, I was in and out of jail.”  

At age 20, he made the decision never to go back to jail and started a community organization, a predecessor to COR. Though he didn’t always listen as a teenager, Mr. Bahar says the activities Mr. Ekulona ran at Harambee helped him recognize the wisdom – the “internal tools” of “values and principles” – youth need to be successful.

In other words, he wanted to build pillars of community. By developing the physical and mental health of young people – to back their self-esteem – the social and physical landscape of poverty-ridden neighborhoods can change, he believes.

Now, the walls of the institute are filled with photos of Mr. Bahar teaching schoolchildren to stay fit and focused through martial arts, leading anti-violence marches, and building projects.

Sitting on an easy chair in the institute’s spotless foyer, Mr. Bahar calls the construction of the institute the “hardest project I’ve ever done in my life.”

Going through the city’s  Vacants to Value program to purchase the properties for $1,000 apiece in 2016, Mr. Bahar worked as a plumber, an electrician, and a carpenter on the project, in addition to piecing together and directing a construction crew of young people over the monthslong effort.

Since then about 60 youths of all ages have been through programming at the facility – COR leadership for youth, an after-school partnership, and those involved with karate classes. 

“When you got [people] who are lifting [weights] and doing martial arts together, you’re building a natural bond,” says Mr. Bahar. “That’s why once you put a facility like this in a community, it is going to build the bond of the residents of that community.”

Building civic sinew

These community connections are a big component of a healthy and sustainable neighborhood, says Seema Iyer, director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, which provides quality of life data for the city’s neighborhoods.

She says the work of restoration by the COR Health Institute is a part of a larger trend in East Baltimore. “There’s a lot fewer [building] vacancies today than there were 10 years ago.” 

On COR’s October graduation night, the building was full, with two local TV news crews, community members, and the graduates.

Phillip Brooks, the evening’s youngest graduate, emphasized how he learned leadership by example, like his brother Mr. Green. Leadership is “not just about wanting or expecting people to follow you. It’s more doing the right thing when no one is looking,” he tells the crowd. 

What that means, he explains later, is putting his all into whatever he does: “I was never the straight-A kid. ... I always did the bare minimum.” But now, he has come to believe, he says, that when “putting your all into everything, you notice the difference in your life: More opportunities open up.” 

As the graduation ceremony came to an end, Mr. Ekulona, who counseled Munir as a teen, spoke: “I listened to each of these six men. I hear leaders, I hear people of courage, people of integrity, and this is why I am so pleased.”