The 25th annual Capitol Hill Community Achievement Awards dinner in May will honor three individuals who give much to the life of our neighborhood. Gary Peterson, who first came to the Hill 40 years ago, and Dan Tangherlini, a part of the rising generation of community and city leaders, have been part of the extraordinary effort to sustain and preserve the Eastern Market in the wake of last spring’s devastating fire. Emily Guthrie has for nine years been at the helm of the Capitol Hill Group Ministry, steering that social service organization with uncommon grace and compassion. The three have contributed much to life on the Hill; they share an infectious dedication to and enthusiasm for our community. The dinner also honors Capitol Hill Village, a young, non-profit that assists people who wish to stay in their own homes as they age. It will receive the Capitol Hill Community Foundation’s annual $10,000 Arnold B. Keller Jr. Award to help underwrite the Capitol Hill Village “membership plus” program for residents on low and fixed incomes.

Gary Peterson came to Washington in 1969 from his native Iowa courtesy of Uncle Sam, drafted out of law school and sent to work as an army clerk-typist at the Defense Language Institute in Anacostia. An invitation to dinner with Congressman Wylie Mayne and his wife, the parents of a close friend from high school, brought him to Capitol Hill. “Gee,” he remembers thinking, “this is a nice neighborhood.” He and his wife, Trudy, rented an apartment in the basement of a house owned by Austin Beall, who was an active member of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society and something of a neighborhood institution. In 1976 Gary and Trudy bought the house across the street from Beall on Maryland Avenue Northeast and have been there, more or less, ever since.

For 20 years Gary worked as a lawyer with the Justice Department, specializing in issues relating to the use of public lands and later as manager of the land and natural resources division there. He tried upwards of a hundred cases and traveled extensively, including to Alaska where he worked on the complex legal case resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdiz oil spill.

Early on, recruited by their friend Austin Beall, the Petersons began volunteering for CHRS. Gary started as a House Tour jitney driver in Beall’s Buick convertible. He and Trudy went on to serve the organization in other roles including terms for each of them as president. Gary carved out a specialty in zoning issues, some of which become highly contentious, requiring patience and diplomacy as well as expertise.

Walking Trudy, an international consultant on issues relating to archives, to the Metro one morning last April, Gary passed crowds of neighbors who had gathered near the still smoldering Eastern Market. Already, people were saying that not just the building but the community of merchants that functioned inside it must be preserved and many were asking where they could donate money to help. By the time Gary and his dog left Seventh Street later that day, he had agreed to a request from his friend and neighbor Nicky Cymrot that he chair a committee of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, one that would receive and administer the newly created “Eastern Market – Keep it Going” fund.

The months that followed were busy ones as money came in from friends of the market here and all across the city. “It was,” Gary recalls, “an amazing outpouring.” He remembers people crying as they handed him checks, some of which were upwards of a thousand dollars. “It really touched the heart of everybody,” he says. “I would never have guessed that.” Throughout the summer, the red Capitol Hill Community Foundation tent was a fixture at the market on weekend mornings, staffed by volunteers Gary organized, collecting money and selling t-shirts. At the Justice Department, Gary says, he had practiced “management by walking around” and that experience served him well. Almost every day, he met with market merchants, and some days he went down there twice just to find out what was on people’s minds. He helped the merchants figure out what they needed: he provided funds for the scale and tables that allowed Maria Calomiris and her sons and other merchants to set up early in the summer outside the market; he worked out a deal to get a refrigerated truck for poultry merchant Melvin Inman so he could be there too; he found a Korean translator to ensure that Joann Jung, who sells vegetables, understood what was going on and was comfortable with the arrangements.

Despite the enormous amount of time he put into it, Gary is embarrassed when he is given credit for the extraordinary generosity evoked by the fire and the successful transition to the temporary market structure late in the summer. “This is not something I did,” he insists. “This is something the community did. We really did a good job.”

One person who helped make that good job possible has been city administrator and Capitol Hill resident Dan Tangherlini. When, late that Sunday night, he got a phone call from the fire department telling him what was happening, he called Mayor Fenty to let him know. Dan says the mayor immediately understood the market’s tremendous importance not just for folks on the Hill, but to people all over the city. To everyone, not just those who live on the Hill, it represented community. The mayor, Tangherlini says, “got it.” He also told him that he should go back to sleep because the next day was going to be a busy one.

It would not be the first for Tangherlini, who moved to Capitol Hill in the early 1990s with a Presidential Management Internship that led to a series of high pressure jobs with the federal government. He worked at the Office of Management and Budget, learning that “the budget is how the executive sets priorities. If it’s funded, it’s a priority.” He worked also for the US Department of Transportation but found it a little slow for one who had developed an “adrenaline addiction” from working at OMB. He jumped at the chance for a three-month stint as acting CFO for the DC Metropolitan Police Department just as Anthony Williams was running for mayor. It was a frantic time of working long days, evenings and weekends. Dan ran the transition team for Tony Williams while moving to modernize the police department. In the summer of 2000 he was asked to take over the DC Department of Transportation, which he did, heading it for six years with an intense focus on customer service and on creating a revenue source for the city from the sudden hunger for public space for fiber-optical computer equipment.

When Adrian Fenty invited him to join his administration, Dan agreed, becoming the mayor’s deputy for management and running what he called the “nation’s first e-transition.” Dan had enjoyed working with Fenty when he was on the DC Council. His “high level of demands” could be exasperating, but the two men were well matched in terms of energy and vision. When, just a few months into Fenty’s administration and on the same day, fire devastated not just Eastern Market but also the Georgetown library, both men saw it as a chance to show what government can do, how it can work with citizens, not just to meet their needs but also to encourage community cohesion. Their promise to move quickly was realized when the temporary market structure opened just four months after the fire.

Dan has lived on the Hill for 15 years at least in part because he’s a dog guy, and there weren’t too many places in other neighborhoods that you could rent with a dog. Here it has not been a problem. He bought a house on D Street Northeast in 1993 and began the long, slow process of renovating it. His wedding two years later was a Capitol Hill affair – the rehearsal dinner was at the Monocle, the ceremony at St. Joseph’s church, the reception at the Sewall-Belmont House, and the pictures were taken on the grounds of the US Capitol. Dan and his wife, Theresa, a pediatric nurse practitioner, now share their house not only with two dogs but with daughters Cassandra and Francesca as well. They all consider themselves “incredibly fortunate” to live on the Hill.

Emily Guthrie first came to Washington as part of a program hosted by the National Cathedral that invited young volunteers to experience life together in Christian community. Living with other volunteers in a house near the Cathedral, she volunteered full time for Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a social service organization then based on Maryland Avenue NE, doing everything from organizing summer programs for kids in the shelter to representing Sasha Bruce at community meetings. She also found her way to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, where she began as part-time coordinator of youth programs. She moved to Capitol Hill (living, she says, in “various basements”), began working full time at the church and appearing in shows with the St. Mark’s Players. She and a good friend from Princeton University, novelist Louis Bayard, starred together in memorable productions of “Our Town” and “Hans Christian Anderson.”

Encouraged by St. Mark’s then rector Jim Adams, Emily began exploring the idea of becoming a priest. She loved working with young people and their families and learning from them much about life in community even as she wrestled with issues in her own faith. Sponsored by St. Mark’s, she left Washington for three years to pursue a master’s degree in theological studies at Yale University.

Emily returned to Washington as a deacon in the Episcopal church but without a clear sense of what came next. The product of a family of scientists (her father was a chemical engineer), she took a job at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and put her church life on hold. It was only when she realized that her coworkers were making a habit of coming into her office, shutting the door and sitting down to talk through their own life issues, and when she began to mentor a young woman from a deeply disturbed and impoverished family, that Emily began to see that the depression she had been battling was, in some ways, an asset. “My struggles have become one of my tools when I deal with other people,” Emily says, acknowledging the unusual empathy she brings to everything she does. Her mentee, Lakeisha, now married and the mother of three, became her good friend and her window into another reality.

A friend from St. Mark’s, Lynn Kneedler, then executive director of the Capitol Hill Group Ministry, invited Emily in 1998 to help plan festivities to mark that organization’s 30th anniversary. Emily found a good fit for her interests with CHGM’s mission of bringing together funds and energy from various faith communities to meet the varied needs of families and individuals in need. “I felt as if I had landed in a place that mirrored who I was,” she says. In her nine years as executive director of CHGM Emily has supervised a staff of 11 full-time workers and seven part-timers. She’s proud of what she’s done to make the organization more genuinely ecumenical, bringing the Capitol Hill Havurah, a Jewish congregation, and the Buddhist, Seventh Day Adventist and Latter Day Saints communities more closely into Group Ministry activities. An annual interfaith Thanksgiving service has become a “wonderful celebration of religious diversity” and also a way to thank volunteers from the various communities. Emily has overseen a strengthening of CHGM’s board of directors, helped raise $250,000 for the renovation of “Shirley’s Place,” a townhouse that serves as the day center for homeless families in the Group Ministry’s congregation-based shelter program, and encouraged many other initiatives.

Emily used to refer to herself as “the nun in the neighborhood,” feeling that her single status gave her a unique ability to focus on the needs of other people. A year and a half ago, though, she married lawyer Michael Lindner and became step-mother to his children Noah and Jamie. The time is right, she feels, for a sabbatical and an opportunity to reflect on what she has done and on what comes next. She leaves Capitol Hill and the Group Ministry with great affection and a feeling of privilege at all she has experienced here with us.

At the gala fundraising dinner on May 14 in the Great Hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library, their friends and neighbors will honor the distinguished service to the community of Gary Peterson, Dan Tangherlini and Emily Guthrie. Proceeds from the dinner, the Foundation’s primary annual fundraising event, are disbursed via small grants to projects in local public and private schools; after-school programs in academics, sports and the arts; adult arts and recreation activities; and projects in neighborhood preservation and beautification.