In response to the film screening of Swimming in Baltimore: How Poverty Works, the Baltimore Bureau of the Real News Network examines poverty as an idea—above and beyond a painful set of facts or circumstances. Poverty is a concept which permeates a community not just through institutions and laws but imbues profound psychic barriers and social walls that often influence people’s thinking about it. Poverty is an idea that exists as both a symbolic representation of how the city works and a psychology of despair that erects obstacles to substantive change. I designed the workshop as a response to this challenge.