The idea came to them on a porch.

Freddie Gray had just died. The 25-year-old’s spine was broken in the back of a police van, and protests against police brutality were being held in Baltimore.

A few days later, a group of high school students gathered on Sarah Hemminger’s porch. The news crews were gone, but the root issues remained. What could they do to bridge the growing racial divide in Baltimore? What could they do to get people to take a closer look at what was happening?

“There was this deep sense of resentment that there was something transactional that had happened and a missed opportunity for something transformational to have happened in our city,” said Hemminger.

The group eventually agreed on an answer: dinner.

The students on Hemminger’s porch were part of Thread, a nonprofit she founded in 2004 with her husband to eliminate barriers for underperforming high school students in Baltimore through mentorship.

Read the source article at Forbes