Built to Lead

That moment was the culmination of several years of conversation and concern among civic advocates, entrepreneurs, and business leaders about Baltimore’s future. In the early 1950s, leaders affiliated with the Citizens Planning and Housing Association began convening around issues such as urban decline, land use, and economic competitiveness.

Following a landmark conference on Baltimore’s challenges, a group of business executives—led by figures like James W. Rouse—continued meeting informally to explore how the private sector could better coordinate its influence and resources. Those discussions ultimately gave rise to the Greater Baltimore Committee, founded on the principle of taking prompt, decisive action to strengthen the region’s economy and quality of life.

The GBC worked on many substantial issues during its early years, including construction of the Jones Falls Expressway, development of Friendship Airport, construction of the Baltimore Civic Center, and creation of the Maryland Transit Authority. But two hallmark projects were spawned by the GBC in its first 15 years that changed the face of Baltimore – Charles Center and the Inner Harbor redevelopment. In 1964, David Wallace, a renowned architect who had worked with the GBC’s planning committee on the Charles Center project, produced a plan for a 30-year, $260 million effort to redevelop the harbor’s edge. Four years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a $22.4 million federal grant for Phase 1 of the Inner Harbor project and renovation of the Inner Harbor area began in earnest.

In the 1970s and 1980s, GBC turned its attention to “quality of life” issues, including education, housing, minority business development, regionalism, and cultivating the next generation of leaders for Greater Baltimore. In public education, GBC found a contributory role for the business community, recognizing that quality public education was a process fundamental to Baltimore’s progress in all other areas of community life. In 1978, the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Baltimore merged with the GBC. This merger provided the area with a single, private-sector voice concerned with the problems and issues facing Baltimore City and its five surrounding jurisdictions – Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties. In 1988, GBC teamed with Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development to create the CollegeBound Foundation, whose mission is to help low-income Baltimore City students attend college.

Throughout the 1990s, the GBC would continue to play a key role in shaping funding and management reforms for Baltimore City Public Schools. In 1996, a peer institution would be founded that would play an equally important role in shaping the economic future of the Baltimore region: the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB). Led by a partnership of regional business executives, elected government officials and leaders from higher education, the EAGB focused on marketing the region’s most valuable assets across the life sciences, healthcare, financial services, information technology, and defense sectors. This focus dovetailed with the work of GBC, which began its work to redefine Baltimore’s economic future to include a major emphasis on technology industries – particularly biotech. In the early 2000s, strengthening the region’s biosciences sector would emerge as one of GBC’s top priorities.