Three Years of Capacity-Building
The Anacostia Park and Community Collaborative was launched in 2015 and now has over 30 members who are working together to maximize the value of the Anacostia River corridor for residents of Ward 7 and Ward 8 in the District of Columbia.
Much of the work that the Collaborative has accomplished over the past years has been due to the support of the Chesapeake Bay Funders Network's Capacity Building Initiative. Administered by the Chesapeake Bay Trust, this three-year comprehensive program provided support to APACC and other watershed organizations throughout the region through grants, one-on-one training, networking, and tailored technical assistance to increase operational effectiveness. Over the years, we have also received generous support for our park programming initiatives from the Conservation Fund and the National Park Foundation.
In our third year of this program, the Collaborative has accomplished a lot! We will be releasing a full report later this year, but for now, here is an abridged version and some highlights:
We established internal Network Principles to guide how we work together and opened our network for new members.
We established Vision Principles for what we want to accomplish together and are now drafting a shared Policy Agenda to share with government agencies and elected officials.
We created a steering committee to help plan out our activities and host different types of gatherings to organize our work
We launched an internal grant fund that led to increased collaboration between members and new programming in watershed parks, and we later restructured this fund to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We launched the Meaningful Engagement Cohort that has brought together new partners to improve programming for Ward 7 and Ward 8 residents in Anacostia Park. We partnered with the National Park Service to host a series of weekend events last year that brought together local musicians, artists and celebrities to celebrate local culture alongside community partners and traditional environmental program providers. We are preparing to launch a modified version of this program again soon.
If you’d like to learn more about our work, or join in on some of these efforts, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter below and check out the calendar of upcoming meetings and events.