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Paying It Forward

Najib Jammal’s youth organization teaches budding Baltimore entrepreneurs how to give back to their communities

By Karen B. Manahan

Jasmine Squirrel was only 16, but she was determined to get what she came for when she walked into the Baltimore Housing office with three classmates in August 2007. The students wanted funding for two after-school programs that needed books for the tutors and supplies for community gardens. “It was at a mansion, and we had to be very professional,” Squirrel says of the meeting with the city’s deputy commissioner of community services. “We told them the good things about the programs . . . [how] it keeps kids off the street [and] opens your mind, and you step out of your box and think bigger things.”

The four students “were ready to go in and say, ‘This is something you need to pay attention to, and I’ll tell you why,’ ” recalls Najib Jammal (Baltimore ’03), executive director of the youth nonprofit YOURS. Their determination was impressive, he says, and so was the outcome: Jasmine and her classmates walked out with a pledge of $25,000.

Squirrel is one of 45 student members of YOURS (Youth Organizing Urban Revitalization Systems), a Baltimore-based nonprofit founded in 2005 by Jammal, a part-time Spanish teacher at Frederick Douglass High School. YOURS shows students how to launch and run small entrepreneurial ventures—selling handmade jewelry, T-shirts, gift cards, original music, and even educational comics—and reinvests the profits into youth programming and service projects.

“YOURS presents an alternative to some negative avenues,” Jammal says. “It teaches kids [that] businesses should be socially responsible.”

The project began when Jammal rounded up a few other teachers— including fellow Baltimore ’03 alumni Zach Norris, Barbara Dang, and Nathan Parham—and got his students working on community gardens and serving as after-school tutors. “We knew we wanted to create hands-on opportunities,” Jammal says, recalling a student barbecue where “the kids said, ‘There’s trash in the neighborhood, no place to get good food, our school is boring, I don’t get pushed and don’t get to do anything,’ and so on.”

After a logo-design contest and a drive to sell T-shirts raised $600 to set up a free community garden in southwest Baltimore, Jammal put up $1,500 from his own pocket to buy the first of four screen presses that YOURS would eventually own and operate.

The rest of the funds came from local grants and one unexpected source: actor Will Smith. “We were working out of a church, and Will Smith’s grandma saw what we were doing and liked it, Jammal says. She took a proposal to Smith in California, and soon after, the students got four Macintosh computers and more T-shirt equipment.

YOURS has worked with more than 400 students to date, sparking their interest in new activities. After creating a T-shirt to raise funds for the community group Baltimore College Debate, some of the students got involved in the organization. “At first I wasn’t into debating because I thought it was for a whole bunch of geeks,” Squirrel says. “But it’s fun, and I like it.”

In May, YOURS students set up shop at their very first store in Hampden, Md., and the program will expand to include four more schools this year. Down the road, YOURS plans to offer micro-credit loans to program alumni interested in opening their own businesses.

Squirrel, now 17, graduated from vocational school for hairstyling in June. She wants to open a salon in Baltimore. “It’s a big family, really,” she says. “I want to give back to the community, to younger kids who might want to go into hairstyling or really anything else.”