It occurred to me again the other day, during a conversation with Julia Baez, CEO of a nonprofit called Baltimore’s Promise: There are two kinds of people around here — those who tackle (or at least care about) the city’s problems and challenges, and those who sit in comfortable chairs and carp about the failure of Democrats and do-gooders to create utopia on the Patapsco.

Baez and Baltimore’s Promise are firmly in the former group, though they’ve done little crowing about their efforts and achievements.

Baltimore’s Promise is all about helping a specific group of children and young adults, 14 to 24 years old, survive poverty, unstable family life, trauma, depression, and all other obstacles imaginable and unimaginable. Older youth, particularly boys becoming men, are at higher risk of failure and violence than any other group in the city. Yet, as Baltimore’s Promise found, they are the most underserved. “There is really no central triage for young adults in the city,” Baez says. “You have to go agency by agency to see what you can cobble together, and for this population, based on all our research, it still woefully fails to meet the need.”

Since 2012, Baltimore’s Promise has been doing something about that with support from the Fund for Educational Excellence and local foundations. Baez and her colleagues work with other organizations to steer young adults to the services they need — education and summer learning, health and wellness, housing, jobs, and safe spaces.

I only learned about this recently, when a photograph of Montaze Cooper appeared in an email referring to June 20 as Montaze Cooper Day.

Baez and Baltimore’s Promise wanted that young man remembered because he is the face of their mission — a son of the city, full of energy and promise, but worn down by trauma at an early age. He took his own life on June 20 last year. He was 23.

“When I met Montaze, he was living in his car,” Baez says. “He had been kicked out of his house. He had lost friends and family. … We got him into his first apartment. I took him shopping at Ikea. It was my best day.”

She saw great promise in Montaze. She learned that, despite his troubles at home, he had graduated from high school at Poly and college at Coppin State, the latter during a time when he was homeless. “If he didn’t have access to a dorm, he was unhoused,” Baez says. “There were times during [the pandemic] when he was in the dorm at [Coppin] and had nowhere else to go.”

Montaze so impressed Baez, with his spirit and ideas, that she hired him to help recruit other young adults into the services they needed. He also worked in a youth grant-making group to distribute funds to programs deemed critically important to their peers. He was a motivational speaker, writer and true enthusiast for the mission of Baltimore’s Promise.

“He was just such a wonderful personality, with huge ideas, and he pushed us in every way possible,” Baez says. “Montaze was an employee and, for myself, he was a very close friend. …He was just a wonderful person.

“And he struggled with what we know a lot of young people struggle with — lots of trauma and challenging experiences.”

While he had plenty of help and support, in the end, it still wasn’t enough to keep him alive.

“We gave him a job,” Baez says. “We got him an apartment. We were all there for him. We were loving on him.”

Montaze’s death, Baez says, “was devastating and continues to be devastating for all of us.”

On Montaze Cooper Day, Baltimore’s Promise said he “carried with him the beauty and the grit of Baltimore.” But navigating all the challenges obviously took a toll, as it does for many others.

Piles of research show the 18-to-25 years being particularly hard. The suicide rate for that age group has increased while it has fallen among older adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while shootings and homicides in Baltimore are down significantly, people 20 and younger were frequently the targets of gunfire during the city’s eight years (2015-2022) of 300-plus homicides.

“My colleague, Bridget Blount, who’s our deputy CEO, said something that I’ll never forget. She said, ‘Those first 18 years matter.’ And there are some things that you just can’t get past as a young person or it becomes something just really, really hard to work through.”

Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of Baltimoreans engaged in these efforts to help more kids and adults get on track to a better life. It’s probably the toughest work in Our City of Perpetual Recovery.

“He was,” Baez says of Montaze, “what we all dream about when we think about the best hopes for what happens in this work with young people. So it continues to be a story that reminds us that you have to keep loving all the time. … And we just have to figure out the wellness part, especially for young Black men in the city of Baltimore. It took us five months to find a Black male therapist [experienced with youth and trauma].”

Now, she says, there’s a growing network of people who understand the challenges that Montaze faced. Building and funding an ecosystem of help for young people like him is how Baltimore’s Promise honors his memory.