Driving down Russell Street on the way out of Baltimore, it’s hard to miss the giant orange warehouse sign: WHAT IS AND WHAT CAN BE. This is the unofficial mission statement for the non-profit Second Chance. Its official mission: Retrain, Reclaim and Renew. That is, to retrain people, many just out of prison, for full employment; to reclaim building materials and architectural salvage for use in renovation and new construction, and to renew usable materials to help eliminate waste in the environment.
Mark Foster is the founder and CEO of Second Chance, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit that has created thousands of “green collar” jobs for the hardest-to-employ in the years since it started in 2001. At the time, Mark and his wife Mary Blake were looking for historically accurate materials to fix up their own house in Roland Park. The complications of finding and repurposing architectural salvage sparked the idea for Second Chance. “There are basically two ways to go with this kind of business,” says Foster, “for-profit and non-profit. Serving the community made it an easy decision.”
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