Current Activities

2025 kicks off our Seventh Annual Patapsco Days Celebration! Patapsco Days is a roughly month-long thematic event where we host programs about the history, environment, and sociopolitical aspects of the Patapsco Valley Heritage Area (PVHA). This year, our theme is “Advocacy & Action”: Exploring how people, places, and industries are all vital to pursuing justice and equality in the past and present.

Join us and hear from Howard County NAACP Chapter President, Willie Flowers, as he gives a brief scan of the need for civil rights advocacy in the United States and the build up to 2025. This talk will reflect on the resilient leaders of the past as a measure of what will be required in the future.

This talk takes place in the Avalon Room at the Miller Branch Library in Ellicott City, at 6pm. This event is not an official Howard County Library System event.

Willie Flowers is the president of the NAACP Howard County Branch and former president of the NAACP Maryland State Conference. Flowers advocates to make technology a key social justice issue by promoting grassroots access and equity for seamless exposure to promote workforce development and entrepreneurship to all residents of Maryland. He is also guiding mental health advocacy in a post-pandemic America that incorporates reading, writing, communing with nature and mindfulness practice as solutions to all families and communities. Additionally, his work includes raising awareness about the negative effects of the Crime Bills of the 1990s and the unified effort required to lessen the pain and amplifying what it will take to heal American communities. The Branch is currently leading a community-based effort to combat the attacks on DEI programming, the threats on immigrant families by promoting businesses and organizations who promote a culture of compassion under the banner of “EP-One” or E Pluribus unum “Out of many, one.”

Professionally, he serves as the Chief of Strategic Initiatives for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender where he develops and implements the long term, agency-wide transformation by evaluating policies, programs and resources to strive to advance MOPD. He also serves as a liaison between business & community stakeholders to implement strategic vision for the agency. He is a specialist in grassroots lobbying and resource development.

Flowers formerly served as the Executive Director of the Park Heights Community Health Alliance in Baltimore, MD where he founded a food justice program called Urban Oasis and Up Park Heights Community Mindfulness which was designed to introduce mindfulness practice as an outlet to promote inner peace and love as an organizing tool. While with the agency he guided programs in the areas of community/economic development, health access, and overall family support for those in need.

Flowers is a historian and a collector of memorabilia of the Civil Rights Movement of the United States. He is a native of Alabama and a graduate of Troy University.

Flowers resides in Ellicott City, MD with his wife Kimberley and twin sons. He is an avid runner, writer, and urban farmer.

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You can find our full calendar of events HERE.