Ex-Baltimore school board member racked up contracts, connections before FBI search

Clad in a tuxedo, Mujahid Muhammad looked out at a crowd of Baltimore luminaries at his nonprofit’s gala and thanked them.

“We are building something. We’re not sure what it is. We’re not sure where we can go with it,” Muhammad said at KEYS Empowers’ 2016 event, according to a video the nonprofit posted on YouTube. “But my drive is the same drive I had playing ball: I’m gonna win. I’m not gonna lose. And with your support, through your relationships, I can’t lose.”

Since then, observers and those who know him say Muhammad, a licensed social worker, has built KEYS into a network of companies earning millions in city, state and federal funds, while networking his way further into powerful political and social circles. In 2023, Mayor Brandon Scott appointed him to the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners.

But after FBI agents searched his Baltimore County office on Sept. 30, the influence Muhammad cultivated has begun to waver. Baltimore City Public Schools and Behavioral Health System Baltimore are ending contracts with his company, and an ethics panel is reviewing the school system’s relationships with his businesses. Scott accepted his resignation from the board hours after the FBI action.

The scope of the FBI investigation is unclear, and Muhammad has not been charged with a crime. Numerous attempts to reach Muhammad and his top staff have been unsuccessful.

KEYS stands for “Keep Encouraging Youth to Succeed,” and those who know Muhammad say working with city youth is his passion, doing grassroots outreach in the trenches where it is needed most. The organization claims to help 2,000 at-risk children annually.

“He’s always been a steward of the community,” said Del. Sean Stinnett, who knows him from the Gwynn Oak Muslim community and from working with young people.

Earl El-Amin, resident imam at the Muslim Community Cultural Center for Baltimore, has known Muhammad since he was a student at Morgan State University. “He was very good at what he did. People saw his heart,” El-Amin said of the people Muhammad helped. “They saw his sincere intentions to work with them and to provide the resources and services to improve their conditions.”

As a result, he said, Muhammad was “very, very successful.”

Known for wearing fedora hats around town, Muhammad was an active participant at the twice-monthly school board meetings. His questions centered most often on students’ safety in and out of school and their mental health.

On a personal website that is no longer online, Muhammad said he was the oldest of 10 children and “naturally became an expert at protecting and empowering others at an early age.” He graduated from Morgan with a degree in psychology and played baseball. He’s said that after getting injured, he channeled his energy into volunteering at a group home, where he saw a need.

“You assume that systems are helping,” Muhammad told Baltimore magazine in 2023. “We sometimes blindly believe that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, but they were just warehousing kids.”

He earned a master’s degree in clinical social work from the University of Maryland and worked for Catholic Charities before fully branching out on his own.

Promotional materials referred to Muhammad as a “visionary founder” of KEYS Enterprises, which is described as a “mission-driven ecosystem spanning a nonprofit mental health organization, a for-profit social work firm, and a workforce development company supporting reentry through security services.”

Muhammad’s work is part of the city’s vast patchwork of grassroots organizations, which often collaborate to provide services to young people. Dayvon Love, director of the think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, said he and Muhammad connected over their mutual interest in having Black-owned nonprofits serve a larger role in the city’s social services space.

“The belief is that our community really has everything that it needs within it,” Muhammad told The Banner in an interview earlier this year. “And if we can create opportunities for people, the community really, to take advantage of all of the resources that they have within, that we can find ways to heal.”

Muhammad is the executive director of his nonprofit, KEYS Empowers, and the owner of KEYS Development TA LLC, a for-profit company that earned at least some of its revenue through a 2025 school contract and smaller jobs he did for individual schools.

Both organizations were in the mental health and drug treatment field, but publicly available records show that KEYS Development generated more revenue.

Records show that KEYS Empowers’ annual taxpayer-funded revenue grew from $18,000 in 2016, the earliest year available, to more than $2 million in both 2023 and 2024, the most recent years available. The nonprofit also was awarded a $3.25 million state contract with the Department of Juvenile Services in November 2025.

Through the nonprofit, Muhammad has been working toward building what he refers to as a “Healing Village” in West Baltimore to help kids affected by gun violence. He’s twice held groundbreaking ceremonies, in 2022 and 2025, but construction appears far from completion.

About $30 million flowed to KEYS Development through state Medicaid payments between 2019 and 2024, a Banner analysis of state and federal data shows. Half of that revenue came from billing for intensive outpatient drug treatment, which typically involves counseling services for patients two hours a day, four days a week.

With their growing earnings, KEYS entities and their top executives — Muhammad, along with Keith Roles and Abdul Salaam, who also did not respond to requests for comment — have contributed more than $50,000 to local political campaigns since 2019. The largest amounts went to state Sen. Antonio Hayes, from the city’s West Side, who received $19,750, and state Sen. Cory McCray, from the city’s East Side, who received another $9,500. McCray declined to comment.

Hayes, who received an award from KEYS at an event held at Lexington Market last year, stood by Muhammad.

“For more than a decade, KEYS has brought trauma-informed care to communities that too many institutions have walked away from. I’ve seen that work in District 40, and I’ve supported it because it makes a real difference for young people and families,” Hayes said in a statement. “Accountability for public dollars matters, and I support any fair review. At the same time, no findings of wrongdoing have been made.”

Muhammad was among a group of service providers tapped by then-Mayor Catherine Pugh in 2018 for regular roundtable meetings where they discussed how best to meet the community’s needs and address violence by attacking its root causes.

Then in late 2023, Mayor Brandon Scott tapped Muhammad to fill one of the vacancies on the school board. A panel that interviews and vets candidates sent five names to the mayor. Muhammad was ranked fourth on the list, having received five “ayes” and four “nays.”

Asked about that appointment this week, Scott said: “When you think about all the folks there, he was the most qualified when you think about what we were looking for in the school board at the time.”

KEYS Empowers started doing work for the school district in 2022, then secured a spot in 2025 on a three-year multiagency contract to provide mental health services to students. But the financial disclosure statements Muhammad submitted each year he served on the board show that he initially failed to fully disclose his financial interests and employment in KEYS Development and KEYS Empowers.

Muhammad filed amended financial disclosure statements in June 2026 to correct the record. A source with knowledge of the school board’s operations said a school district ethics panel was scrutinizing those statements.

As a school board member, Muhammad often visited schools to check on issues that had been identified in school board meetings, said Karl Perry, who represents the principals union. Perry said that level of attention was appreciated.

Kwame’ Jamal Kenyatta-Bey, another Baltimore school board member, said he was shocked to see his colleague resign from the board. He described Muhammad as a good adviser and a friend.

“He knows the political terrain. He knows the social terrain. He’s been involved with communities. So really, I’m just thoroughly impressed with him,” Kenyatta-Bey said the morning after Muhammad resigned. “He has often been the one to bring an insightful and a strategic look at how the board approaches its governmental role. It will be a great loss to lose that voice on the board.”

Banner reporters Kristen Griffith, Cayla Harris, Maya Lora, Greg Morton, Emily Opilo, Kasturi Pananjady, Lee O. Sanderlin, Ellie Wolfe and Alissa Zhu contributed to this story.