Doug Baldwin continues to walk the walk, well beyond his Seahawks playing days
As an advocate for social change and betterment, Doug Baldwin was one of the NFL’s best at talking the talk to improve society.
Now, beyond his Seahawks playing days, the former Pro Bowl wide receiver continues to walk that walk.
The retired Seahawk was in Renton on Monday, but not at his team’s headquarters in the city.
Baldwin was at the proposed site for his Family First Community Center, a recreational and health-care center for the Cascade/Benton neighborhood of Renton he is partnering to build.
“This is a full-service facility where people can come and get medical services, dental services, mental services, financial services,” Baldwin told espn.com’s Brady Henderson from the center’s site about seven miles south of the team headquarters where he used to work and train for the Seahawks.
“The approach that we have taken with this project is that we’re looking at the whole human, and we want to service the whole human.”
Baldwin began the project in 2016, the year he tied the Seahawks’ franchise record for receptions in a season. He’s building the community center in conjunction with the City of Renton and the Renton School District. He and the center have raised $10.5 million of the $15 million they are seeking for the project. Baldwin has given $1 million.
The State of Washington gave his project $1.5 million. Renton’s First Financial Northwest Foundation raised $3 million. King County donated $3 million and Starbucks $150,000. The project is two years into a $4 million capital fundraising campaign.
Baldwin told Henderson he hopes to break ground on construction for the Family First Community Center in February.
Baldwin, who turns 31 next month, held the Doug Baldwin Family Combine athletic event at Renton Memorial Stadium in June to benefit his community center. According to his db89combine website, The First Family Community Center’s goal is “to enhance the stability of the community by helping families achieve goals in education, fitness and overall health.”
According to the government’s most recent city data for Cascade/Benson area of Renton, the majority of the neighborhood’s residents are an ethnicity other than white. The average household size in the area where the community center will be is 6.1 people. That’s nearly 2 1/2 times the state average household size. The neighborhood has almost twice as many single-mother households and natives of foreign countries as Washington does on average.
Over 20 percent of the neighborhood’s residents have attained education levels below high school. The state average is less than 10 percent.
Baldwin’s Family First Community Center is another way he is impacting society far beyond the Seahawks.
His retirement this spring after three offseason surgeries and an injury-filled 2018 season was AN end for him.
Not THE end.
He’s on his way to doing more important work in our society than win NFL games.
“Football is such a small sliver of your lifetime,” he said in December. “If you know me I always have a plan.
“If you know me, you know I’ve got a plan for everything. The method to the madness.”
His method matters. Far more than football.
In 2017, a year after he began this community center, he started a Seahawks players’ fund for social change. Counting donations from outside the locker room, Baldwin’s initiative raised millions for social causes in Western Washington.
For the past three years the Stanford graduate has lobbied Congress to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for low-level crimes. His letter to a Congressional committee debating a bill on the matter was so brilliant, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made sure he co-signed it.
When the Seahawks played a game at the Jets later that week of Baldwin’s letter to Congress, in October of 2017, Goodell came to the Seahawks’ hotel in Jersey City across the Hudson River from NFL headquarters in Manhattan to meet with Baldwin. The commissioner talked to Baldwin about the league becoming more involved in players’ social causes such as the ones Baldwin champions.
The son of a career law-enforcement officer while growing up in the Florida panhandle testified at the Washington State Capitol for police-reform legislation in the training and policies for the use of deadly force.
He’s met with law-enforcement officials and community leaders from across the Pacific Northwest on deescalation methods police officers can use to help prevent needless killings in confrontations. He’s met with Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson about these and other issues, as well.
Last year Baldwin has zeroed in on a new target: Fixing what he says is our country’s “antiquated” cash-bail system. Baldwin and many others believe cash bail unfairly jails citizens of lower socioeconomic status for non-violent and minor offenses, simply because they don’t have money to pay standard bail.
With his common sense and decency toward those less represented in our society, it’s not out of the question that Baldwin may have politics as his next career choice.
He smiled the time or two I mentioned that to him later in his playing career.
“He has been an extraordinary part of this program since we’ve been here,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said this spring, after Baldwin informed his coach he was probably going to retire. “He has given us everything he has had. He’s been a great competitor and player and all that. And we believe in him and trust him so much that wherever this (retirement decision) goes, we are going to support him.
“Forever.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2019 at 6:54 AM with the headline "Doug Baldwin continues to walk the walk, well beyond his Seahawks playing days."
