By Helena Marquina
On a Wednesday evening in the Pen Lucy neighborhood of northeast Baltimore, the playground beside Faith Christian Fellowship Church fills with noise as two very different sets of students arrive.
Johns Hopkins football players, big enough to command a room yet relaxed enough to crouch down and laugh with eight-year-olds, arrive and begin to mingle with children from nearby schools. For the next half hour, the space is alive with chatter and laughter.
The playground is new. In 2024, Blue Jays for Baltimore, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, raised $30,000 through a golf tournament to fund the renovation. The players didn’t just write a check. They helped tear down the old structure, laid the mulch, and built something new with their hands.
It’s a fitting metaphor for everything the organization is trying to do in the city it calls home.
Founded in 2023 by former Blue Jay football players Tom Grehan, Andrew Rich, Marcus Cager, Oliver Craddock, and Ryan Wilson, Blue Jays for Baltimore has endured and is currently run by president Browning Trainer and vice president Jacob Pion. The organization has built its mission around a simple idea: Hopkins student-athletes have something to offer beyond the football field. Their partnership with the Pen Lucy Action Network (PLAN) puts that idea into practice every week. The Learning Center program, which has served the Pen Lucy community since 1996, pairs local students in grades one through eight with one-on-one tutors who commit to showing up, week after week, for the entire school year.
Sessions run in two groups, Wednesday and Thursday nights, and follow a steady rhythm. After the opening play time, the group gathers for roughly 30 minutes of updates, conversation, prayers, and crossword puzzles. Journal time follows, giving students a chance to work on their writing and reflection skills. Then comes the academic core: individualized tutoring through Exact Path, a software platform that routes each student through a math or reading curriculum.
Lynn Beans, a former PLAN supervisor who also works in Baltimore City middle schools, said the structure of the program reflects a philosophy that goes well beyond test scores.
“Our students are not just people who need help with school,” Beans said. “Our students are people who are growing spiritually, growing emotionally and socially, and growing academically. What I love about PLAN is that it addresses the needs of the whole child.”
Consistency, she said, is the program’s fuel.
“Children thrive in consistency. It’s just a fact,” Beans said. “These consistent relationships being built through the Learning Center, of students and tutors, and students with each other and adults in our program, it’s pivotal.”
That consistency is evident in the relationship between Jacob Pion, BJB’s current vice president, and Cienna Numa, a seventh grader he has tutored since she was in the fourth grade. Pion started attending Hopkins in September 2023, and Cienna was the first student he was paired with. Three years later, he still shows up every week.
“When we first started, Cienna was definitely more shy and not as outgoing,” Pion said, “but over the years we’ve sort of developed a great relationship. I keep up with her and her family. She’s got a new baby sister that I’m always asking her about. She plays volleyball. We try to keep that connection to their lives outside just academics, too.”
Cienna has a strong bond with Pion after their years together.
“My favorite part about working with Mr. Jacob is that we can switch from doing work to having fun at random times. And I feel like we’ve grown together over the years.”
Pion said Cienna has grown in maturity and academic experience, working one to two grade levels above where she’s supposed to be, proving she’s driven, competitive, and increasingly willing to sit with difficulty rather than avoid it.
“Cienna is just like me in the sense that we’re both very competitive,” he said. “I can see her get frustrated when she can’t get a math problem right. She’ll say something like, ‘I just want to stop, I’m just doing extra school.’ So I’ll ask her: ‘Is this you being the best version of yourself?’ We’ve set that standard for each other now. She’ll say, ‘No, I have to figure this one out myself.’ The coolest thing hasn’t only been the progress in academics, but the growth and the shift in how she approaches challenges.”
Now, Cienna’s younger brother Cam, has joined the program this year as a first-grader.
“Since he’s started, I feel like he’s grown too,” Cienna said. “Like, he can express himself better.”
Beyond tutoring in Pen Lucy, BJB works to weave its students into the broader fabric of Hopkins athletics. Each fall, the program hosts a game day at Homewood Field, where the kids from PLAN come out to cheer the Blue Jays on. It is, by all accounts, a blast.
Pion came to Baltimore having heard the negative things people say about the city; the warnings, the reputation. What he found was something else entirely.
“Once you’re here, once you’re living in it and you meet the people, it takes me right back to home, right back to South Florida,” he said. “Very similar lifestyle. People are very home-oriented here. The kids I interact with, they’re all very down-to-earth kids. The people make the place. And that carries weight. I love Baltimore, and I mean it when I say that.”
For Beans, relationships like the one between Pion and Cienna are proof of commitment and consistency, the very things that make the program worth fighting for, even when the early weeks are slow and the bond hasn’t formed yet.
“It does take time,” she said. “But what I admire about these guys is that they choose to invest anyway. And what you see is that, with time, there is this beautiful relationship between people who would probably not come in contact with each other otherwise. And it can be life-changing.”
