Olayemi Harleston became interested in firefighting as a middle schooler — a realization sparked by the mostly female paramedic team of the TV show “Chicago Fire.”

On Thursday morning, next to a brick building with soot-covered windows and the charred remains of a nearby car, Harleston hoisted a ladder to the first-floor balcony of a nearby building.

“More force,” said Mya McConnell, one of the deputy chiefs at the Baltimore City Fire Department, directing Harleston from the sidelines. “Now rest. Reposition.”

Harleston, 22, is one of four women recruited in last year’s 13-person firefighting class — a demographic the department is eager to increase. In an annual summer program known as Camp Spark, the Fire Department hosts a two-day camp where young women ages 12 through 16 learn firefighting and emergency medical skills, and gain leadership and team-building experience.

This year, Camp Spark will host 68 young people from around Baltimore — the program’s largest group since it first began six years ago.

“The fire service for women is something that a lot of communities don’t get exposed to, because it’s always been looked at as a dominating career for men,” said Khalilah Yancey, one of the deputy chiefs with the department. “This gives them a chance to be exposed to the fire service and see what women can do.”

Of the department’s 1,500 members, 17% are women, and only 3% of them respond to fires.

In 2020, 95.6% of firefighters were men, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is a disparity many fire departments across the country have aimed to change, including Baltimore’s with the creation of Camp Spark in 2018.

Harleston never attended the program — but would have had she known about it at that age, she said.

In the past, one member of Camp Spark has gone on to join the Fire Department — but that’s not exactly a measure of what makes it successful, according to McConnell. Attendees learn a range of skills, from CPR to fire escape plans, and they leave the camp as “better members of the community,” she said.

“Sometimes the youngest kids are the ones that are the bravest and stand out the most,” McConnell said. “Camp Spark is really powerful for some of the older kids, because they get reminded of what they used to be like when they were 12.”

McConnell and Yancy were one of a few women who attended fire school together decades ago. In the same way that her dad encouraged her to look into fire service, McConnell now encourages her daughters.

“Not everyone has family like that,” McConnell said. “This is an opportunity for us to show the citizens of Baltimore the Fire Department family, and to see where they can fit in.”

Yancy said she was proud to show her daughters, as well as the women at Camp Spark, that with hard work and determination “there’s nothing you can’t do.”

She added that many young women arrive at the camp reluctantly, but by the end they “don’t want to leave.”

Inside the department’s firehouse, Helen Odenwald practiced CPR on a dummy while Harleston held oxygen to its mouth. Odenwald, who is 24, fell in love with firefighting at 17 years old as a cadet for the department.

“We’ve proved to the guys that we can do it, because we want to do it,” Odenwald said. “I think it pushed us to do better, to prove to not only ourselves, but to them.”