The Center of the Circle

 

Back to the drawing board. Sticking this here for context: Sally Brown:Let Them Drown, Village Green/Town², 10/27/2025

The story of The Source is this: There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. - - the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Let me draw a picture for you. This is why young people in our community are “falling in.”

This is the center of the circle. If you don’t address this, nothing is solved. This is why more police at the Mall or more SROs in schools will never be the solution, because they don’t address what’s in the center of the circle. Addressing unmet needs must be proactive as well as reactive.

If people are starving, for example, more police and more arrests will not solve the problem that people are stealing bread because they are starving.

Look at how this plays out:

Unmet needs negatively impact physical and emotional development. That, in turn, impacts school progress and school and community interactions.

Look at the four corners of the picture. What happens when the unmet needs are not addressed and the harm keeps progressing? The harm progresses into the next parts of life and compromises:

• Healthy relationships 
• Mental Health
• Job and educational opportunities 
• Overall quality of life and life expectancy 

Erika Strauss Chavarria, Founder of Director of Columbia Community Care, has been working steadily for years to address the root cause of what’s damaging young people in our community. People who are trying to make this a story about politics are negating her experience, her knowledge, and her well documented work with young people.

That’s sexist.

Anyone who puts something else at the center of the circle is nenegating the mission of The Source:  to address unmet needs. Young people are falling in and drowning. This is a crisis. It is an emergency. And it is happening primarily to Black and brown children and teens whose opportunities and life experiences have been marred by racism and all its resulting harms.

If you claim that’s not in the very center of the circle, right now in this moment: that’s a racist and harmful act. 

When young people’s lives are at stake you don’t prevent emergency services from performing life saving work because you are worried about “how this” and “who this” and whether you are inclined to like “this or that person” involved in the process. The most important part of the equation is the precious human beings whose very survival hangs in the balance.

Howard County has been showing that they think it’s perfectly fine to derail life-saving work if it benefits their candidate in an election or if they just plain don’t think a certain part of the population is worth saving.

There are ways for any newspaper, any blogger, any candidate to ask questions and perform due diligence without grandstanding and destroying the good name of an invaluable local nonprofit and its leader. And without poisoning the well against the deep and urgent need for The Source.

The way that this has run through social media and the community has been due to wildly irresponsible behavior from outside our community and from within it. And when I see candidates being swayed by that kind of behavior and even emulating it, I am disgusted.

The scandal here is the folks who are willing to weaponize The Source, turning the entire story into something it most certainly is not, and use that as a weapon in a political contest.

This is the story. Unmet needs.

Unmet needs create both immediate and long-term harm.

If you don’t understand what’s going on with the Source project: go to the people who understand what’s at the center of the circle. Anyone else right now is probably selling you something.

That’s it. It’s not politics or campaign finance. It’s whether or not people are willing to value young people - - whose futures are so precarious - - and make a proven and proactive solution our unshakable priority in Howard County. 

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