On the day before she was to begin work at Living Classrooms—the first job of her post-college career—Maggie Feiss died from a condition known as SUDEP (Sudden and Unexplained Death in Epilepsy Patients). She was 22 years old.

When Maggie was eight, she asked to be allowed to walk up the street to a retirement home where she immediately made loads of friends whom she had fun playing games with and reading to. For her community service project at Bryn Mawr School, Maggie volunteered to work for the summer in the preschool connected with New Song Urban Ministries. Within two days, she knew the name of every one of the more than forty boys and girls who came to love her.

Maggie graduated from the University of Southern California in May 2008. She had majored in Urban Policy, Planning, and Development, and it was her declared intention eventually to come home and “fix Baltimore.”

Maggie knew some of Baltimore’s problems. She had worked as a college intern with the Baltimore Community Foundation’s Middle Grades Partnership, which gave her a sense of the challenges within the Baltimore City public schools. Because epilepsy prevented her from driving, she became an ardent advocate for public transportation. She also helped rehab houses in some of Baltimore’s most dilapidated neighborhoods when she was in high school and had worked in housing for the Enterprise Foundation in Los Angeles.