Meet the incredible force that is Brittany Young of B-360 Baltimore - an organisation that is blazing a trail by changing the face of the dirt bike industry, using dirt bike culture to improve the lives of young people in their community.
By bringing together Baltimore’s love of two wheels with STEM education programmes, B-360 is giving life tools and training to youths and adults to secure educational and career opportunities in STEM fields, all whilst building bridges, disrupting the prison pipeline and changing perceptions of dirt bike riders and engineers along the way.
Brittany Young is the founder of B-360 and the driving force behind the organisation. As a professional engineer, technology teacher and Baltimore resident, Brittany’s work at B-360 is truly born from a love for her community and a genuine passion for generating positive solutions to the problems faced by the dirt biking community each day. To put it bluntly, the world needs more people like Brittany Young who work to improve the lives and career prospects of the young people around her. We caught up with Brittany recently to find out more about B-360, what a ride it’s been so far and plans for the future!
Brittany Young - Founder of B360
Hey Brittany! So let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell us how you came up with the idea for B-360?
It was an idea that I had in 2016, when I noticed two reports. The first showed how STEM education and STEM jobs can move communities out of poverty; 120,000 jobs were available without needing a 4-year degree. What I couldn’t see were ways to connect local people with those jobs, and how to grow the talent to reach those jobs.
The second report focused on the increase in police measures in Baltimore and the creation of a “Dirt Bike Task Force”. What most people don’t know about Baltimore is that it can be a misdemeanour to even possess of a dirt bike.
…What?! That sounds crazy to us!
Yes. The Dirt Bike Task Force was created to uphold that law. Separately, one of my younger brothers was incarcerated as an adult for non-violent offences, so I became even more engaged in wanting there to be resources and for there to be programs available to support the community – I don’t believe we can police our way out of problems.
I agreed that dirt bikes should be made safer, I just wanted there to be resources available to make that happen. I didn’t want to wait on the city to create it – I decided to make my own programme around it.
Do you know what the reasoning was behind the city making possession of a dirt bike a legal offence?
Off-terrain vehicles aren't meant to be ridden in the streets, I understand that, but you can also look at data in any way you choose to – for example, you can find data that shows that dirt bikes can explode inside your home, making them unsafe.
The impact of that is removing a huge part of the community in Baltimore, just because someone thinks it’s dangerous. Cars can be dangerous, but they haven’t removed those.
There are better ways of doing it – if you make it a misdemeanour to possess something, you innately categorise people as criminals. So, kids who had a dirt bike became criminals.
So is B-360 a full time job for you now?
Up until 2016 I had three full time jobs – I was a Technology teacher for primary school students, I worked at a community college for a program that got people from graduate degrees into two-year degrees for careers at NASA (without having to do a four-year degree), and I was working as an engineer as well.
Sometimes people think you wake up one day and become a full-time entrepreneur – that’s not true! You need funding. I was probably working over 120 hours a week, 40 of those on B-360, at that point in my life. I think I got three hours of sleep a night – if that.
Then I won a global fellowship with Echoing Green – an organisation that provides seed funding to entrepreneurs for their business ideas, so by the end of 2018 I had transitioned out of teaching. I still advise for the community college, but I don’t work directly with them anymore.
This is my first time having just one job, but the one job has a lot of jobs as part of it.
You’re probably just as busy as before!
Yes – maybe even busier since the pandemic started, as it pretty much wiped out our budget so my whole job became trying to figure out how to pivot and still get funds. I’m also on the transition team for Baltimore’s Mayor Elect, so I sit on different boards and councils, helping advise the mayor during their first term. The work that I do just keeps growing!
Hopefully that is laying the groundwork for some bigger changes in policy to happen.
We hope – there’s still a lot of work to be done and the main issue for us is that we need funds to be able to do this work with the city and councils – they don’t fund us.
2020 has been an incredibly hard year the world over but for organisations such as yourselves that rely on funding it must have meant some serious struggles. Tell us about how this year has been for B-360.
We’ve still been able to do our in-person programmes, but not in the same capacity. We typically would see about 1,200 students a year, but without our usual level of funding and being in a global pandemic we haven’t been able to do that.
We launched a virtual series called Toolbox to really dig deep into problem solving; one of the episodes talks to an engineer about how to create a dirt bike part; another episode was about how to advocate for your rights – who in public policy should you go to, to talk about dirt bike offences, to change the law; another episode was about building narratives around dirt bike riders. Typically, when people talk about black people it is always from a deficit, so we purposely don’t use words like “underrepresented”, “low income”, “minority” and so on – we speak truth to power in our people.
Two more programme initiatives will be launching soon – one with Baltimore Library and D. Watkins, whose book is called We Speak For Ourselves, and we’ll be running a programme where kids will learn how to build model-sized dirt bikes and create stories around why they ride from that asset-frame narrative and learn how to be their own advocates.
My larger focus is really to recoup our budget but also create a capital campaign to fund a space here in Baltimore that B-360 owns – not the city, not random people but our own facility where people can ride dirt bikes safely, take classes, use a mechanics shop, and host events inside the space. That will help us really grow this industry to benefit the people and the city, and expand our model across the country.
That’s incredible – and this will be available for all ages?
For our STEM programme, if you’re under 16 you’re “in programme”, if you’re over 16 you get hired and trained. So it’s all age groups, and we have the three areas that we work on – transferable skills in STEM and motor sports, growing community/advocacy and working with cities, and the third is public safety, safe spaces and working to create different laws.
Apart from the challenges that come with trying to fund work, and this mental year, what have been your biggest challenges?
We have the support of the community that we serve, but some of the challenges with government have always been the narrative and rhetoric around dirt bikes which speak to people’s biases around black people. Before us, the narrative only described dirt bike riders as ‘gun-toting criminals’, ‘drug dealers’ – anything negative you could think about – and that wasn’t true nor was it fair. Governments have a bureaucracy and a system that has to work within a box with constraints – what I really need from a local government is for them to work with us, not to specifically create a space for us, but allocate funds to us as we have the same outcomes as the Dirt Bike Task Force. If you can give money to a policing task force, you should be able to give money to an educational programme and proactive solutions that save the city money as well. We don’t need them to solve the problems – they can help us to improve the city and we can do the groundwork.
With the last two mayors’ administrations, we were on a task force to create solutions, and out of that came recommendations to grow B-360. What we need now is the government to follow up on that, and it’s the perfect place to start for our new incoming mayor. We need to grow the solutions that are already here in Baltimore.
Dirt bikes in cities are not synonymous with Baltimore – it can be Cleveland, Oakland, Philadelphia, New York – and we want to be able to go to those cities and work with the riders and the city to resolve misunderstandings and conflict and create a positive resolution.
You’re raising people up to achieve the same outcomes – that can only benefit the wider community!
Same goals, different methods.
Do you feel that you’ve seen the attitudes towards dirt bikers change since you started B-360?
For sure – most recently I spoke to senators and delegates about some issues in Baltimore relating to dirt bikes. What was different this time was that they called me to talk about it and agree that they wouldn’t go and police. This is pivotal, as it’s the opposite of their previous approach. Before they would have just called the Dirt Bike Task Force. We’re opening up conversation and dialogue that there can be a balance between a Dirt Bike Task Force and our programmes. People are starting to acknowledge that there can be better ways to approach these issues and create solutions.
Of course, there are still some attitudes that are the same, especially from people who don’t understand. A lot of people have never asked a dirt bike rider why they ride. They just know that they don’t like it, and that’s all that they think that they know. They don’t take time to understand it further or have a conversation about it. I always say to people, “If there was something you did to relieve stress, and it was illegal, would you still do it?” There is not one person that can tell me they wouldn’t. If owning a yoga mat was illegal, people would still have a yoga mat and they would still do yoga.
People could empathise more – they don’t have to agree with riding in the streets, we don’t agree with that, but we empathise and can understand why, which helps us to shift them out of traffic and into our programme and safe spaces.
So finally, what are your plans for the future of B-360?
In the short term, we’re redoing a bus to make it a mobile classroom so we can go directly into communities and work with youth and young adults.
The next step is the push for space so we can have a B-360 facility, a place for indoor and outdoor racing, a space to house the dirt bikes, fix and repair them, to hopefully one day manufacture our own dirt bikes, and of course to run our programming. It will be a place where we can grow B-360 to a whole new level – not just a place to ride, but a facility to grow talent and skills. Even if you don’t like dirt bikes, everyone says the same thing – dirt bikers need a place to ride. We agree! Help us fund it so we can help them do that and more.
To find out more about B360 and donate to help them with their incredible work click HERE
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