Charm City Indivisible is proud to announce our endorsement of Tiffany Welch for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 40! 

There’s a line Tiffany Welch came back to again and again when we sat down with her—a sentence that turns out to be the key to almost everything she’s done: opportunity and access are not the same thing. It sounds simple, but it’s the difference between a city that announces a multimillion-dollar investment in West Baltimore and a block where that investment never actually arrives. It’s the difference between a state grant that exists on paper and a neighborhood developer who waits two years for the red tape to clear. Tiffany has spent her career working to close that gap, and we couldn’t be more excited at the thought of her bringing that focus and energy to Annapolis.

Sixteen Liquor Stores, Zero Supermarkets

Before Tiffany ever thought about Annapolis, she was the Director of Health and Food Justice at the No Boundaries Coalition in Central West Baltimore—the neighborhoods around North Avenue that, in the months after Freddie Gray’s murder, the whole country watched and then forgot. During her time there, she came to a startling realization: the community had sixteen liquor stores for every fresh-food outlet, and not a single supermarket would come. The chains told her the neighborhood was too chaotic, too risky, too uninterested in fresh vegetables to be worth it.

The residents told her something different: They wanted fresh food. They just couldn’t get to it. 

So Tiffany made it happen. She borrowed a van, bought five-dollar bags of produce from a group called Gather Baltimore, and set up a pop-up inside the most run-down public market in the most disinvested corner of the district. She threw concerts and hosted cooking classes and tastings to get people through the door, because she knows that few things bring people together like music and food. And the people came: soon, she found, they were opening at ten in the morning and selling out by eleven-thirty. So she took it a step further, reaching out to the CEO of Whole Foods, who was so impressed that he flew to Baltimore, took a tour, and connected her with the grant that turned a pop-up into a community-run produce store—stocked at cost from Whole Foods and local Black-owned farms and staffed by neighbors from the same community it serves. Ten years later, it’s still open three days a week.

What impressed us almost as much as this story, though, was how Tiffany talked about it. While clearly and deservedly proud of this achievement, she didn’t sell it as a triumph. She told us the truth: that the neighborhood is still a food desert, that the systemic change she fought for never came, that she won a foothold but not the anchor grocery the community actually needs. We started the work, she said, but there are a lot of players at the table who need to be convinced to invest. She wants to go to Annapolis to be one of those players.

The Vacant House Next Door

That same lens is how Tiffany thinks about the issue she names as her top priority: vacant housing. She lives in the heart of West Baltimore, next door to a house that’s sat empty for seventeen years, and she’s clear-eyed about why the money the state already spends doesn’t fix it. Maryland creates pools of funding and designations—Opportunity Zones, Sustainable Communities, the Baltimore Regional Neighborhood Initiative—meant to draw investment into neighborhoods that need it. But the money doesn’t reach the local, minority, and women-led developers who understand those neighborhoods best, and the permitting process is so slow that, as a grant writer herself, Tiffany has had to return funding she couldn’t spend in time.

She pointed us to a block where the city sank millions into a rec center while the houses around it crumbled—and where a handful of Black developers have been ready to build since 2024, stuck waiting on a process built for big firms with big administrative staffs. Her answer isn’t more money. It’s pairing the money with the thing that actually gets projects finished: technical assistance, streamlined permitting, and support aimed at the community-rooted developers who keep getting left out. We throw money at things, she told us, but the people who need to get the money, the people who need to get through the processes, are often left out. That’s the gap between a headline and a changed block—and closing it is, in a sentence, her theory of the job.

Closest to the Problem, Closest to the Solution

If the first thing to understand about Tiffany is how she diagnoses a problem, the second is how she handles what she doesn’t yet know. More than once in our conversation, she told us plainly that she didn’t have an answer—and then told us exactly how she’d go find one.

On tenant protections, she was candid that her organizing in this area is new, sparked by a campaign volunteer fighting a predatory landlord who collects public dollars for subsidized buildings he lets rot. Tiffany knows the impact cold; she’s walked those buildings. But on whether to pursue just-cause eviction or rent stabilization first, she wouldn’t bluff. She’d advocate for a pilot program, get on the relevant work groups, talk to organizations like Baltimore Renters United who are already doing the work, and figure out what exactly the root cause of the problem is, before she puts her name on a bill. She spoke similarly about the tipped minimum wage, which she says she would be inclined to eliminate—but she’s also watched real servers testify that a flat wage could cut their take-home, and she’s not willing to override the people a policy is meant to help without taking the time to truly understand their lives first.

This is, frankly, what we want. We’ve said before that we care less about whether a candidate has every answer than about whether they know how to find one—and Tiffany does. She even has a name for it: Modern Collaborative Governance, her framework for building policy from the lived experience of the people closest to a problem rather than from the top down. It isn’t a slogan she just made up. It’s the throughline of a fifteen-year career.

A Delegate Who Will Show Up

District 40 sends three delegates to Annapolis. One of those seats has been held, for the better part of two decades, by an incumbent who—by Tiffany’s own account, and that of many of her neighbors—has been their representative in name only. He doesn’t fundraise. He doesn’t knock doors. And this year, he was the lone House Democrat to vote against the Community Trust Act, the law keeping local police out of federal immigration enforcement that so many of us fought for.

Tiffany is the opposite on both counts: present where he’s absent, and clear-eyed where he’s wrong. She wants to build a 40th District Advisory Council, made up of residents, young people, returning citizens, and community leaders meeting with their legislator every quarter, so that people don’t only see their representative at election time. She told us that, when she’s out knocking doors, one of the questions she hears the most is “why do we only ever see you guys at election time?” She is determined not to be the answer to that question. After two decades of being represented in name only, the district deserves someone who shows up.

Why We’re All In for Tiffany

We didn’t arrive at this assessment of Tiffany’s record alone. The people who’d be her closest colleagues in Annapolis—nearly every member of District 40’s current delegation, including our endorsed candidate Delegate Melissa Wells—chose to bring her onto their ticket. The people best positioned to judge her readiness want her in the room, and that tells us something.

We also deeply trust her judgement, and that came through when our conversation turned to the question of campaign finance. Some candidates we admire refuse all PAC money, which we respect; Tiffany gave us a different answer, and one we found just as strong: rather than a blanket rule, she showed us discernment. She accepts money from labor PACs, has refused money from energy companies she expects to be fighting on affordability, from predatory clinics, from negligent assisted-living operators—and she sits down with every lobbyist who approaches her before accepting a dollar from them. That’s not a compromise on her values—it’s a more precise expression of them. The line she draws isn’t no PACs, it’s no money from the people she’ll need to hold accountable, and that’s exactly the line we’d want a delegate to walk.

Tiffany is a West Baltimore native who came home to the house she was born in, learned service at the side of her grandmother—the trailblazing Councilwoman Agnes Welch—and then spent more than a decade earning her own standing, block by block, without ever holding elected office. Real roots, real work, real results, her campaign says. We checked the work, and we’re proud to endorse her.

How to Support Tiffany Welch

Tiffany Welch is running for delegate because she’s seen too many headlines about investment in West Baltimore that never showed up on the block, and she believes she can do something about that. We agree–and if you do too, here’s how you can get involved.

• Donate to support her campaign in these final weeks
• Volunteer to help reach voters before Election Day
• Talk to your neighbors—tell them why you’re voting for Tiffany and encourage them to join you
• Vote for Tiffany Welch! Check your registration and find your polling place today. You can vote early from June 11 to 18, or vote on Election Day, June 23.

District 40 deserves three delegates who show up—and for too long, one of its seats has gone to someone who doesn’t. Tiffany Welch will be present, accountable, and relentless for this district in a way that seat hasn’t seen in twenty years. We’re voting for her, and we hope you will too. 

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A note on our endorsement process:

Our endorsement process begins with a thorough questionnaire, which we make available to all declared candidates in a race. Completed questionnaires are evaluated, and candidates who score well are invited to an interview with our endorsement committee. In some cases, a sitting officeholder with a strong legislative record may qualify for a streamlined track: in place of the questionnaire, our committee prepares a review of the candidate’s record to ground the interview. Because this path could otherwise advantage incumbents, we hold those candidates to a higher qualifying standard, not a lower one. After all interviews are complete, we deliberate and announce our endorsement of the candidate who most aligns with our values.

Charm City Indivisible evaluates all candidates using the following criteria: alignment with our values, thoughtful policy positions, demonstrated commitment to constituent engagement, and a track record and/or clear vision of fighting for working people over wealthy interests. We apply these standards equally to all candidates we evaluate. We believe voters deserve to understand not just who we endorse, but how and why we made that decision.