While writing my story this week on the influence of Nationals Park on the surrounding neighborhood, I focused a lot of time on a non-profit called Positive Nature. The non-profit runs an after-school program that includes tutoring, sports, art and movement therapy, and a lot of one-on-one stuff for at-risk kids. I spent several days there just hanging out. This included playing a serious game of whiffle ball, sitting in on group discussions, and watching some of the more courageous kids lip sync and dance in a Motown revue.

My reason for being there: Positive Nature was/is contemplating shutting down because it can’t afford the property taxes on its building. Its taxes have increased 755 percent in the last two years.

But I think I shortchanged the non-profit in what I wrote up. I described the kids–as I do in the above graph–as “at risk.” This is journalistic shorthand, a cliche to be used when you just don’t have enough space for actually writing who these kids really are. Here are some of Positive Nature’s kids that I met or at least heard about:

*A set of twins who lost their parents when they were little. The majority of their relatives have also died. They spent a lot of years worrying if they were going to be split up into two different foster families. For a time, I think they were split up.

*A teenager who recently graduated the sixth grade. When he first came to Positive Nature, it was unclear whether he was homeless or not.

*A little girl who already has gone through about 10 foster families.

*A teenager who claimed that if she wasn’t at Positive Nature she’d be out drinking.

*A 17-year-old who is one of 11 kids in his family. There were issues of neglect. One of his brothers was murdered. When he came to Positive Nature, he was a kid who could curse in whole paragraphs. Now he has a job cleaning the building. When he’s not sweeping the floors, he can often been seen counseling kids.

I wonder what’s going to happen to all these kids if Positive Nature can’t keep its building.

In its heyday, many prominent people supported the Eastern Branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. “It was a central charity of the NBA All-Star Game,” Capitol Hill resident Jim Myers says. “Clinton painted a wall there.”

Last month, however, far less credible advocates lobbied on behalf of the Capitol Hill club. On Nov. 27, Marc Borbely was on his way to class at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law when he spotted several kids soliciting money for the club. “‘Please help us try to keep the Eastern Boys & Girls Branch open,’” he remembers them saying. Borbely found their plea strange: The branch has been closed since August.

Kerrin Torres, spokesperson for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, says, “If we did solicit funds, we’re not raising money for the Eastern Branch.” She says anyone who sees kids trying to raise money for the clubs on street corners or at Metro stops should call the organization immediately.

“It’s bittersweet that people are trying to raise money for the club we don’t have,” says Myers.

Thanks go out to the good people over at Local First D.C. for inviting City Desk out to their first-anniversary party. At Busboys & Poets there was chicken-on-a-stick, falafel, fruit, pitas, hummus, but more importantly, there were stickers!

No, no. More importantly, there were owners of a bunch of D.C. businesses and staffers with the LEDC (Latino Economic Development Corporation), including our new friends: Kate Drew, Leda Hernandez, and Daniel Perra (pictured), who explained the concept: LEDC is is incubating, like very small chickens, the Local First campaign, now in more than 50 communities. Well, they explained it a little differently, but this is a blog, people. We have to fun it up.

In D.C., there are, as of today, 72 members, most in Ward 1, about half of them restaurants and cafes and the rest of them retail and services (salons, yoga, etc.), according to the campaign’s coordinator, Ayari De la Rosa of LEDC. What they get for their membership, in addition to Super Friends who can help stop the world from becoming Wal-Mart, are group rates for expensive things like advertising, marketing, insurance, and utilities. A group of 10 of them actually went in together to switch their electricity to wind energy through Clean Currents and saved 9 percent on costs, says De la Rosa. Go wind!

And not only that: Go D.C. Dept. of Housing and Community Development! The department contributed enough to the LEDC to pay De la Rosa’s salary so that she could get the campaign off the ground. “So many people think D.C. is doing nothing to help small businesses, and of course they could do more, but they’re supporting us on this and we hope they will continue,” she says.

Want to find out more? Of course you do! Read The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition, by D.C.’s own Michael Shuman, an economist and lawyer who’s the go-to on going local. But don’t get it on Amazon, dude. Walk your ass over to Olsson’s.

The list of Most Endangered Places in D.C. announced yesterday by the D.C. Preservation League includes some interesting choices. You’ve got your graffitied frescoes in the old Franklin School at 13th and K Streets NW (now a homeless shelter). You’ve got your Takoma Theater in Takoma Park, built in 1923, which should be preserved because, among other reasons, it’s been used “by independent filmmakers for film previews, including Chris Rock.” Its current owner has been trying to make the case to level it.

Those seem worthy enough. The one I don’t get is the 1900 block of Martin Luther King Avenue SE, buildings only a crackhead could love. The fight to save this major eyesore at the intersection of MLK and Good Hope Road has been going on since at least 1997. And guess what? Ten years later, they’re still vacant, taped-off, and burned out. A fire gutted the buildings more than two years ago, so tell me again why they’re so historically significant?

It seems they are, according to the preservation league, “contributing buildings owned and managed by the DC Housing and Community Development (DCHCD) agency are contributing structures in the Anacostia Historic District, listed in the DC Inventory of Historic Places and the National Register for Historic Places.”

Who gives a fuck? Tear them down and build something the residents of Anacostia actually need and can feel good about. There are fights worth having to preserve historic D.C. This isn’t one of them.

Want to have dinner with the queen? Wait. Let me rephrase that: Would you like to have dinner with queens?

What’s been described as a “band of roving drag queens” will travel in fabulous style—aboard the Queen Force One van—as they work the local restaurant scene tonight to help raise money for folks who live with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other diseases. The queens’ visit is part of Dining Out for Life, an annual areawide event in which dozens of restaurants agree to donate between 25 and 100 percent of their sales to Food & Friends, a D.C.-based nonprofit that provides nutritionally appropriate meals and groceries for the 1,200-plus people who qualify for the free service.

The queens are restricting their prancings to eight restaurants, most of them in Dupont Circle—see the itinerary below—but you don’t have to. This year, 150 restaurants have agreed to participate in Dining Out for Life, including several that are donating 100 percent of sales: Addie’s Restaurant, Freddie’s Beach Bar and Restaurant, and Ristorante Tosca.

Who are the queens? They include Food & Friends Executive Director Craig Shniderman, two makeup artists with M·A·C cosmetics, and three honest-to-goodness queens: Queen Bambi, Queen Bon-Bon, and Queen Kalua.

The itinerary is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s Education Issue digs at a few of the many frustrations with DCPS: charter schools wrapped in red tape, the revolving-door politics surrounding superintendents and mayoral takeovers, teachers who should be fired and can’t be.

Check out these stories and tell us what you think. Here’s another thought: Consider doing more than grousing.

Saturday, April 28, is Hands On DC: the annual and well-organized “work-a-thon” that sends thousands of volunteers to schools throughout the city to spruce them up. After 12 years, organizers have it down to science; you will be put to work and, much like when you were in school, you will be done at 3:30. Most projects involve cleaning dismal spaces, painting hallways and classrooms, mulching, planting and general landscaping work. And if you have a skill—like carpet installation or plumbing or wiring classrooms for computers—you get a gold star. Well, not really, but your skills are needed, so sign up.

And if you need other incentives: Free lunch! Work breaks! An (over-18) after party! Or, hey, just give money.

So which schools need the most sprucing up? You tell us.

Bikes for the World has a problem: Its bikes are too nice. The nonprofit’s mission is to collect donated bikes here and ship them over to Africa. It’s already sent more than 7,000 this year, says director Keith Oberg. The organization prefers to send mountain bikes, he says, considering that many roads in Africa make your average District streets look as smooth as a runway. Top-shelf road bikes, then, aren’t appropriate. Why send a thousand-dollar set of wheels across the Atlantic where it’ll just get trashed in a few weeks?

So the organization figured it would sell its best road bikes and use the cash to buy mountain bikes, parts, and whatnot to support its operation. Problem is, the lease it has for its free digs in the Waterside Mall doesn’t allow for retail.

The big sale was scheduled for Aug. 22. By 6:30 p.m., about a dozen people had already arrived to snap up a cheap bike, responding to a Craigslist posting. But then some customers got lost on the way and called mall security for directions. And that was it for the bike sale—security came by and shut down the fundraiser. Mall management could not be immediately reached for comment.

“This was gonna be an informal thing, but a lot of people showed up,” says Oberg. “I totally blew it. I hope I didn’t blow our lease.”

ADDENDUM, 5:03 P.M.: Oberg says that the management company called him to say there was no problem and that his lease is not in jeopardy. “Things are real cool,” he says. Management spokesperson Mara Olguin confirms that all is cool.

Regulars at the YWCA Gallery Place Fitness and Aquatics Center may soon be pulled out of the water. Due to a budget shortfall, the YWCA is threatening to close the pool for good.

“The pool costs $200,000 per year…the board can’t make ends meet,” says Orysia Stanchak, executive director of the National Capital Area YWCA. Stanchak says hard numbers are difficult to come by—some YWCA members pay for pool use as part of their standard membership—but she estimates that about 175 people purchase “pool-only” packages at $50 a month. “We cannot afford to keep the pool open at those rates,” she says.

Some Y members have banded together for a mission ripped from a bad ’80s comedy: raise $200,000 by Sept. 8, or there may be no more laps. “It’s like a reality show,” says Tamara Alfson, co-chair of the fundraising committee formed by members committed to saving the pool. And as they look under their couches for briefcases full of cash, Alfson and others have questions about financial management—and why the YWCA couldn’t predict and address the facility’s financial problems before notifying members of the pool’s impending closure in late July.

Stanchak says the task force need not have $200,000 in hand on Sept. 8—the pool could reopen if a workable long-term plan is presented to the board later next month. “If someone said, ‘We’re going to sell cookies,’ everyone knows that’s not doable,” Stanchak says. “If someone says, ‘These energy savings save $30,000,’ we can take a step forward.”

Still, Alfson—who uses the pool as part of her physical-therapy regimen for a debilitating joint condition—is not optimistic about the task force’s chances. “We’re not going to have $200,000 by Sept. 8 unless someone flies in and drops money on us,” she says.

For two years now, the D.C. Library Renaissance Project, founded in 2002 by Ralph Nader, has been trying to get the D.C. Public Library (DCPL) to host adult-literacy classes in branch-library meeting rooms, only to be foiled on the basis of “Rule 7.” The rule, which comes from a list of DCPL meeting-room regulations, states that “No regular classroom meetings are permitted.”

That’s news to Nancy Saum, who holds weekly classes in qigong, a Chinese exercise involving breathing patterns and body postures. Saum says she’s held regular classes without any trouble from the DCPL for nearly two years in one of West End Branch Library’s meeting rooms. Branch Manager Barbara Kubinski says the class is “a library-sponsored event” and therefore permissible. Nor have the Needlechasers of Chevy Chase encountered the restriction: Their group meets monthly in a Chevy Chase Library meeting room to discuss the finer points of quilting. (Karen Butler, manager of that branch, says that regular meetings are allowed but cannot be booked for more than three or four months at a time.) And the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library holds weekly sign-language classes in its open area.

“That rule is abrogated at will by various librarians around the city,” says Robin Diener, director of the Renaissance Project. At a recent D.C. Council hearing on adult literacy, her predecessor, Leonard Minsky, called out several librarians by name and accused them of stonewalling his efforts. Diener speculates that Rule 7 might not be the real issue at stake: “There may be something about the style of Mr. Nader and Mr. Minsky that has a certain brashness to it,” she says. “They don’t like Leonard.”

Former DCPL Interim Director Francis Buckley, who met with Minsky regarding the rule, says that certainly has something to do with it. He admits that Rule 7 isn’t always applied in a hard-and-fast manner—“There is always some discretionary aspect of its application,” he says—and adds that he and librarians “did say that we’d consider relaxing that rule for groups we were cooperating with.” The Renaissance Project, says Buckley, is not such a group. “They had presented this proposal to essentially take over the literacy program of the library.…They had no experience in literacy activities,” he says. “They’re not a reliable organization to work with.”

—Isaiah Thompson