Back then, the program was under the auspices of an education program called the Lady Maryland Foundation, which was essentially LCF before it was LCF. “I feel fortunate to have been here since the building of the The Lady Maryland.” He’s referring to a replica 19th-century Chesapeake Bay schooner he helped build with Baltimore City school kids in the mid-1980s. In the near distance are the foundation’s Crossroads charter school, one of the highest-performing middle schools in the city, and the original Harbor East campus where LCF’s first job-training program began.

Below another, participants in the foundation’s earn-while-you-learn Project SERVE program for returning citizens-those recently released from prison-are hard at work on the nonprofit’s newest workforce development center. He’s a leader who never takes his eye off the mission of the organization he’s shaped for more than 35 years.īelow one window, he can watch the progress on the Mildred Belle, one of LCF’s maritime education vessels, being repaired on the organization’s marine railway. Yet Bond’s office sits at the back of the building, facing East Baltimore, a more fitting compass direction considering what LCF does. It’s located in the foundation’s headquarters on the waterfront in Fells Point, located at the Frederick Douglass Isaac Myers Maritime Park, in a building that features the kind of floor-to-ceiling views of Baltimore’s harbor that are the stuff of commercial real-estate dreams. Everything you need to know about James Piper Bond, president and CEO of Living Classrooms Foundation (LCF), can be summed up in his office.

Bond by Piper Scott