Earlier this week, Health Commission Dr. Leana Wen, U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) representative Melodye Watson, and BCHD Youth Health and Wellness Coordinator Andy Masters joined dozens of community members in the Penn-North to discuss how a newly awarded five-year, $5 million ReCAST grant will help change the way we view our communities and how others view Baltimore.

The third in a four-part series.

BALTIMORE - The streets are barren in this East Baltimore neighborhood, save for one active stretch that abuts a few boarded up, brick buildings.

This is a hub of open drug sales. A car pulls up, a hand comes out, there's a trade-off, a bag of something for cash.

A crushed box of the heroin overdose reversal drug naloxone is stuffed under a cracked cement step outside a building.

Someone overdosed here, says Nathan Fields, a Baltimore opioid overdose response prevention trainer. Someone tried to reverse the overdose with naloxone.

Just feet from the drug hand-offs and small social circles, the Behavioral Health System of Baltimore crew sets up a table and piles on naloxone kits.

Over the years, Tyesha Harrell has heard the staccato pop of gunshots, seen the blood-stained sidewalks, and too often heard the wails of grief-stricken mothers whose sons and daughters have succumbed to violence.

"We lost six people yesterday," said the resident of Gilmor Homes, a public housing project in West Baltimore where Freddie Gray was arrested in April 2015, before later dying in police custody.

Yet amid the pain, Harrell, an activist with the citizen's advocacy group, Communities United, is determined to help change conditions for the better. And recently, she heard some good news.

Baltimore, joined by seven other municipalities nationwide, will receive nearly $10 million dollars from the Obama Administration to promote community healing.

"I know I'm not Wonder Woman, but it makes me feel like Wonder Woman," said Harrell.

The second in a four-part series.

BALTIMORE - Dr. Leana Wen is famous among addiction experts across the nation for taking the helm against heroin.

"Nobody wants to be an addict," she says flatly.

The Baltimore health commissioner has an estimated 19,000 residents addicted to heroin in her city of 620,000. This city knows its numbers, figured by an epidemiologist, so that it can better understand and react to the heroin threat.

She's known nationally for her efforts to fight the heroin crisis in her city. "You need a commitment from public health leadership to prioritize this," said Daniel Raymond, policy director for the national Harm Reduction Coalition in New York City.

Wen, 33, who was appointed Baltimore health commissioner in January 2015, says that anyone who sees addiction as a moral failing is wrong. "Science is clear that addiction is a brain disease," she said.