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CHCF grantees gather in the Eastern Market North hall for the first Great Grants Giveaway. Photo: Andrew Lightman

For the last twenty years the Capitol Hill Community Foundation has been receiving financial donations from residents and giving that money back to neighborhood organizations in grants targeted to specific needs. Distributed twice a year, the Foundation’s spring and fall grants range from $500 to $2,500 and they support a remarkable range of projects. On the evening of December 3, grants checks were, for the first time, handed out in person at an event in the North Hall of the Eastern Market billed as the Great Grants Giveaway. Teachers and principals, representatives of social service organizations, community gardens and a large number of local performing arts groups received a total of $111,000. As chairman of the grants committee, I was gratified to be able to pass the generosity of the community on to such a wide range of worthwhile activities and the dedicated people who make them happen.

Supporting Education
Nathaniel Metts, track coach at Stuart Hobson Middle School, received a grant that will buy uniforms for twenty members of the school track team and assist some student athletes with the cost of attending the sports banquet. Carolyne Albert-Garvey, new principal of Maury Elementary School, was thrilled that her school received three grants. One will provide risers for the music program, another will put literature at varying reading levels in two classrooms, and the third will allow the introduction of a pilot program in the teaching of “Singapore” math, an approach that has been successful in Asia and focuses not just on numbers but on critical thinking.  CHCF supported improvements to gardens and playgrounds at Peabody, Tyler and Stuart Hobson, musical theater productions at Stuart Hobson and Two Rivers Public Charter School, and a Shakespeare curriculum that brings together eighth graders from Capitol Hill Day School and the KIPP Academy to perform in the Elizabethan theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Recent grant cycles have seen an increase in the number of requests we get for afterschool tutoring and mentoring programs. We were pleased to support Jan’s Tutoring House (formerly Friends of Tyler School) which offers an after-school homework center and an evening meal to twenty-three youngsters as well as weekly tutoring and mentoring by dedicated neighborhood volunteers at its house on Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Higher Achievement is a city-wide program with a center in Ward 6 that draws students from local schools for intensive after-school tutoring and enrichment that includes special activities like a spelling bee, an annual college visit, and a Thanksgiving dinner. At Cesar Chavez Public Policy Charter School, the RICH (Resources for Inner City Children) program provides well-attended sessions of professional tutoring in math and English on Saturday mornings. Little Lights Urban Ministries works with sixty children at Potomac Gardens Public Housing complex, giving them homework assistance, one-on-one tutoring, computer instruction and time for games, quiet reading, and social interaction. Jane Osborne, founder of the Saturday Environmental Academy, said the overnight camping and educational experience made possible by our grant was “definitely the high point of our fall.” Nineteen kids, participants in this free weekly program in environmental education, went fishing on the Chesapeake Bay and challenged themselves with a confidence-building exercise involving climbing a tree and then going on a zip wire. “It was really hard for some of them but every single one of them did it and afterwards they were all so proud,” Jane told me. Later, she said, they took a night walk on the beach and were rewarded when the clouds suddenly parted and they saw something that many of the children hadn’t seen before, “a fabulous array of stars.” All these programs were assisted by our grants.

As it has often over the years, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, a much-loved neighborhood institution, received a grant for financial aid for students taking afterschool classes in drawing, painting, and music. New to us this fall is Turning the Page, a Washington, D.C.- wide program created ten years ago by a group of young professionals wanting to give back to the city. The goal, according to founder Jason King, is to promote student achievement by encouraging parents to become familiar with teachers, administrators and other parents at their children’s schools. CHCF grants will help fund a series of family nights at Tyler and Payne Elementary Schools where families and faculty have dinner together, then parents will go to workshops while their children read and do activities with volunteers from area colleges. Jason King told me that so far this year attendance at Tyler and Payne has been the best of any of the ten D.C. schools where Turning the Page has a presence. “Parents are coming out in droves,” he says.

Helping those in Need
Education is a major emphasis of Foundation grants, but social service organizations and cultural activities receive a significant amount of our support as well. D.C. Central Kitchen is a large, city-wide program that came to CHCF for the first time this fall for financial assistance for the meals they provide every week to the soup kitchen at the Church of the Brethren on Fourth St. SE. The Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street runs an emergency food pantry that has experienced a significant increase in demand recently. A grant from the Foundation will help Capitol Hill Village pay a part-time coordinator of volunteers and will allow STRIVE-DC, a rigorous job-training program just north of H Street, to provide transportation money to participants. Grants to the Capitol Hill Group Ministry support their Family Resource center and emergency assistance to families in Ward 6.

Supporting the Arts
Community Foundation grants promote the lively cultural life of this neighborhood, from encouragement of the cozy intimacy of performances at Kris Swanson’s Corner Store and the family fun of square dancing in the Eastern Market North Hall to the glitzy appeal of the Atlas Performing Arts Center. The Atlas received a fall grant in support of its new newsletter and performance program but, in addition, numerous groups that perform there received assistance – the Capitol City Symphony, Opera Lafayette, the Washington Savoyards, the Congressional Chorus and its new, highly successful American Youth Chorus. All these groups use Foundation funding to make their performances more accessible to wide audiences by providing low-cost or free tickets. In its application for a grant the Capitol Hill Chorale wrote that its December concert, “A Glint of Brass,” would be inexpensive, performed in the neighborhood and “equal in depth and quality to what one might hear at a major metropolitan concert hall.”