Baltimore Social Innovation Journal, Fall 2016 Fall 2016 | Page 24

Taking Flight “Plant a tree, save a life” is more than just a slogan to an enterprising business owner. By Lisa Simeone Bryant Smith has seen disaster from on high and down low. Growing up in a housing project in East Baltimore, surrounded by what he calls “a lot of nasty things” – poverty, crime, drugs, prison – he never imagined that he would one day be a licensed pilot. It’s not that he started out with that as a dream. As a child, he didn’t even know what to dream. Until he became involved in an after-school program called The Door. into community gardens. He also noticed an occasional follow-on effect: less crime. “I was 13 years old,” he recalls, “and I was living in what I would call a fish tank. No exposure to the outside world, no bridge. Then I started seeing these brown folks coming in and talking like staff, like they were in charge. I had never seen that before. I thought only white people were in charge.” He also started thinking about disasters on a different level. Smith blossomed. “I clung to them,” he says. “I saw them as my way out.” Four years later, when the Parks & People Foundation came knocking, looking for a forester trainee, The Door recommended Smith. He learned how to plant trees, how to prune them, how to transform vacant lots pg. 2 3 From there Smith got a job with the U.S. Forestry Service, which sent him to college and also to sites around the country, to do ecological research projects and study the effects of natural disasters. One component of his education was aviation. Looking down on forest fires from high above, Smith realized he could learn to become a pilot. “What about these disasters that occur every day?” he asked himself. “Hunger, poverty, lead poisoning. How do I provide resources to people in need?” Thus was born Flight 1 Carriers. Smith and his team put together Disaster Relief Packets and Humanitarian Aid Packets, all of which contain potable water, healthy food (not processed or loaded with sodium), and hygiene products. The DRPs, for people who’ve been hit by Hurricane Matthew, for example, contain three days’ worth of these necessities per person; the HAPs, for