Waverly Main Street is supposed to strengthen the neighborhood’s commercial district along Greenmount Avenue and lend a hand to the popular year-round farmers market on 32nd Street.
But some small business owners say that a recent reshuffle at the nonprofit has left them without an advocate.
This month, Waverly Main Street’s board of directors dismissed the group’s executive director, who had only been on the job for two months and says she never received a paycheck.
It’s not clear who is in charge of the nonprofit now. None of the nine board members responded to requests for comment. The Waverly Main Street’s storefront office on Greenmount Avenue was closed on three recent weekday visits.
The national Main Streets program came to Baltimore in the early 2000s, and Waverly was one of the original neighborhoods included. Baltimore Main Streets is housed in the Mayor’s Office of Small and Minority Business Advocacy and Development and supports nine Main Street corridors.
Waverly Main Street hosts an annual book festival and has also partnered with other groups, including the farmers market, to bring entertainment to Waverly Commons, an outdoor event space at East 32nd Street and Brentwood Avenue where the farmers market is held.
Kora Polydore said she was excited to apply for executive director of Waverly Main Street because she understands small business and has had one for two decades. She owns Kora Lee’s Gourmet Cafe on Greenmount Avenue and in January began as the paid head of the nonprofit with a salary of $68,000, according to her offer letter.
“My vision for Waverly was to clean up Waverly and get businesses that could be an asset to the area,” Polydore said.
But she said she quickly found herself in the dark about the nonprofit’s financials, including unpaid invoices from the September book festival. She said she was also unsure of who was on the board.
Polydore reached out to Diana Emerson, the nonprofit’s executive director from 2022 to 2025, and to a representative of Baltimore Main Streets for guidance, emails reviewed by The Banner show. The representative and Polydore planned a call for March 20 with at least one other board member, the emails show.
But then, on March 16, Polydore was dismissed. Polydore said Emerson and Eric Lee, the board president, informed her that the nonprofit was moving to a board-led model and that there wasn’t funding for an executive director position.
Emerson said she attended that virtual meeting and was shocked by its outcome.
“I was unfortunately not aware that that was what was going to be happening,” she said. “I assumed it was going to be something different.”
Emerson said her role since stepping down as executive director in January 2025 has been to help Waverly Main Street transition to new leadership. She said she is not on the organization’s board and does not know what led to Polydore’s dismissal — or what happens next.
While Waverly Main Street was without an executive director, Emerson volunteered to help it with the book festival in the fall. She said that while local businesses made money from the event, “on the Main Street side, the book festival was incredibly expensive.”
She said there was not enough financial support to cover the festival’s expenses.
“They’re working through to pay off final bills,” Emerson said. “It just took a while.”
Waverly Main Street’s most recent tax documents, called Form 990s, available on the IRS website are for the fiscal year that ended in June 2021. That year the nonprofit reported raising about $362,000 and spending about $322,000.
Emerson said the nonprofit has continued to file its Form 990s, though mistakenly under a different name. She said the issue was resolved and that wasn’t sure why they aren’t available on the IRS website.
Nonprofits are required to make public their Form 990s upon request, but no one from the group could be reached to provide those documents.
Polydore said her missed paychecks have her worried about keeping a roof over her head. Her cafe, which moved to Waverly from Catonsville, hasn’t been able to open because of basement flooding issues, she said.
Christopher Lundy, director of the Mayor’s Office of Small & Minority Business Advocacy & Development, told Polydore in email that Baltimore Main Streets is a public-private partnership and does not control operations of nonprofit partners, including Waverly Main Street.
He also asked Emerson and Waverly’s board president to act in good faith and resolve the payment issue with Polydore, according to an email.
Lundy repeated those points in an email to The Banner.
Miller Roberts III, president of the Charles Village Benefits District and a 32nd Street Farmers Market board member, said it took him months to connect with Waverly Main Street over maintenance issues. The market and Waverly Main Street share responsibility for the Waverly Commons area.
He said it has been a struggle to communicate with the organization.
On Tuesday morning, Roberts said, he at last received responses from Lee, the board president, and Odette Ramos, the City Council member whose district includes Waverly.
Ramos is acting as a liaison between the organizations, Roberts said. The council member said in an interview that she’s aware of Polydore’s payment issue and is working with Waverly Main Street to resolve it.
Roberts said Lee gave him the green light to take charge of the maintenance issues at the commons.
He said he worries that, without an executive director, Waverly Main Street will be even more difficult to work with.
“How do we all work together and have transparency?” he asked. “Because I think a lot of problems could be resolved faster.”
Martha Lucius, president of the farmers market board from 2022 to 2024, said she also struggled to communicate with Waverly Main Street.
For a while she questioned whether it was still active.
“When you don’t have a cooperative relationship, it is hard to do the things that are easy,” Lucius said.
Waverly Main Street was once very responsive, according to Tia Hamilton. The owner of Urban Reads Bookstore on Greenmount Avenue said Emerson was a good fit for executive director and was instrumental in getting YouthWorks workers into the small businesses during the summer. She felt supported, Hamilton said.
She said she didn’t hear much from the organization after Emerson left.
Bhim Bk, owner of Swadi Restaurant in Waverly, is frustrated that he has not heard back from Waverly Main Street in several months. Since a deadly shooting last year, Bk said, people seem wary of the neighborhood.
He emailed Emerson and Main Street asking for help to bring in extra security or come up with a solution, but he said they have not discussed the issue with him.
Debonette Wyatt, owner of My Mamas Vegan, said her dealings with Waverly Main Street have always been “very good.”
She said her professional relationships with both Emerson and Polydore were positive.
Emerson helped Wyatt’s restaurant build its patio during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she assisted with other projects over the years, Wyatt said.
Wyatt thinks Polydore would have done well as the group’s director if she’d been given a chance.
“I don’t feel as though she was given the proper support that was needed to fulfill such a job,” Wyatt said. “Where the blame lies in that, I don’t know.”
