Baltimore nonprofit launches Mobile Street Outreach bus to help people in need
Baltimore nonprofit Helping Up Mission (HUM) unveiled its new Mobile Street Outreach bus, with help from a grant from the city's Opioid Restitution Fund.
This drug prevention resource is a result of a years-long legal battle against pharmaceutical companies for the over-prescription of opioid drugs in Baltimore City.
Mayor Brandon Scott's August 29, 2024, Executive Order established the Opioid Restitution Fund, which allows for community grants to be awarded competitively through a Request for Proposals (RFP) process developed by the Mayor's Office of Overdose Response and Recovery Programs and the city's Restitution Advisory Board.
"The soup, and the bus"
Peter Griffin knows the power of a hot bowl of soup.
"Before I can even get into thinking about treatment, I have to be fed," said Peter Griffin, the Director of Outreach and Intake for Helping Up Mission.
Griffin is among 70% of employees and alumni at Helping Up Mission, who are working to give back to the recovery community through the nonprofit's Mobile Street Outreach team.
"We're seeing people come into recovery, come into treatment, and we just want to be out here to meet the need," said Daniel Stoltzfus, the CEO of Helping Up Mission.
"The soup, and the bus was the first thing they saw, and it was a catalyst to draw them into the additional conversation about what I need to do to turn my life around," Griffin said.
Each bowl of soup is made inside of their new bus. It replaces a 1987 model school bus that was converted for outreach.
"This will allow us to have a case management office where people can come in off the street, meet with their case managers, a better equipped kitchen, a more sustainable vehicle to meet the need on the street," Stoltzfus said.
In addition to supporting HUM's Mobile Street Outreach program, the grant supports augmented services to HUM alumni for relapse prevention, including housing navigation, as well as its program for pregnant and parenting mothers.
"I think it's a huge resource in the Baltimore City Mayor's Office of Overdose Response, I think is really trying to bring the community together for a coordinated whole community response, to change the narrative about Baltimore City and the numbers of overdoses," Stoltzfus said.
Helping to prevent opioid overdoses
More than 1,000 volunteers annually serve on the Street Outreach team, including dozens of nursing students working to get real world experience. Towson University rotates nearly 100 nursing students to help. It's a part of their public nursing course,
"It takes an entire community to get people to want to have their life restored, to want to put hope back where they were hopelessness, to put trust back where there was no trust," Griffin said.
The Mobile Street Outreach team plans to use the bus to distribute food, hygiene items, Narcan and more weekly at 10 locations in Baltimore.
The Mobile Street Outreach bus visits the following locations in Baltimore:
- Brooklyn-5th St.
- Cherry Hill
- Edmondson/Poplar Grove
- Franciscan Center
- North & Gay St
- South Baltimore
- Penn North
- West Belvedere Ave.
- Westport
- Wilkens Ave. Mennonite Church
"It'll be warm, it'll be cooler in the summer to really help make that connection for intake, for case management, for referrals to other resources and people in need," Stoltzfus said.
"This is the way you make change. You don't bring change singularly. You bring change communally," Griffin said.
About Baltimore's HUM
In 2025, HUM celebrated its 140th anniversary, while the Mobile Street Outreach team provided 11,271 servings of food and distributed 5,320 hygiene kits.
Today, HUM serves over 650 men, women, and children daily at no charge – making it the largest program of its kind in Maryland – all of whom are 100% below the federal poverty level, while more than 65% have experienced incarceration and 34% lack a high school diploma.
Helping Up Mission was established in 1885 and serves hundreds of people daily.
For more information, visit www.helpingupmission.org.