Feature Story

Youth Opportunities Still Knock

Keeping alive a program that showed promise, then lost its funding.

Baltimore—When Ernest Dorsey spoke last month to 20 youths during their orientation at the Westside Youth Opportunity Community Center in a forlorn swath of this city, he assured them they could count on the center’s services for as long as they need.

“Our slogan around here is, ‘Once a YO member, always a YO member,’ ” said Dorsey, the first and only director of Youth Opportunity Baltimore (aka YO! Baltimore), a youth development program spawned by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Youth Opportunity Grants Initiative of 2000.