Community

Community Garden at Dunbar Towers

Rendering by dc greenworks

On July 23, Living City DC 14th & U launches a project on the grounds of the Dunbar Towers Apartments to create a community garden. The community garden will sit on what has been an underused shuffleboard site. The gardens will create a welcoming space for residents and the community to meet and will give the Dunbar Towers Apartments access to fresh flowers and hopefully even produce. To do this, Living City DC has partnered with dc greenworks, the One City Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), Jair Lynch Developers, and Paul Laurence Dunbar Resident’s Association.

dc greenworks is a non-profit organization that works to grow livable, sustainable communities here in the District. They have partnered with LCDC 14th & U and designed the gardens for the Dunbar Towers Apartments, which will be contained in raised planters to allow residents to grow and maintain the gardens while sitting, rather than bending down. dc greenworks is also a leading DC resource for green roofs and rain gardens, which serve to reduce hard surfaces around homes and other buildings.

LCDC 14th & U will also rely on youth from the SYEP. SYEP is open to young adults ages 14-21 every year, and provides temporary summer employment. SYEP offers youth a chance to earn money, gain skills, and expand interest in new careers. LCDC 14th & U has arranged for 12 youth directly from the from the community to assist with developing and maintaining the community garden at the Dunbar Towers Apartments for between now and August, where they will help with building and planting in the raised boxes. The SYEP programs is managed by Deborah Thomas, the LCDC 14th & U Director of Community Outreach and an ANC 1B Commissioner.

This community garden serves many purposes concurrently. At face value, as a garden, it is a convenient source of interaction with nature and plants for the seniors living in the buildings, as well as a source of fresh produce for residents of the Dunbar Towers Apartments. It also allows for young people in the community to build something of value within their own neighborhood, and bring people from parts of the LCDC 14th & U larger community into contact with the residents of The Dunbar Apartment.

In order to make this project a success, we need your input! Here is how to get involved:

Installing the Community Garden

Saturday July 23, 2011 at 10 AM

At Dunbar Towers

2001 15th St NW Washington, DC 20009

To sign up to volunteer with the community gardens, go to the Join Us – DC page on our website, http://www.livingcityblock.org/!

Thanks to dc greenworks, Jair Lynch Developers, and Paul Laurence Dunbar Resident’s Association for cosponsoring this community garden with Living City DC 14th & U!

To learn more about Living City DC, dc greenworks, or other programs in this blog, check out these websites!
Living City DC

dc greenworks

One City Summer Youth Employment Program

Jair Lynch Development partners

Are You in the Know?

You are reading this because you have an interest in the 14^th and U area. Perhaps you have lived here all your life, or maybe only the last few years. Maybe you don’t live in the area but have some other reason to want this historically vibrant neighborhood returned to its former glory. LCDC 14^th & U is working to help make that happen. The question is, how can you stay up to date on ways to volunteer, or keep abreast of all of the work going on in the area?

There are a number of ways to be involved:

Fill out the form on our website to let us know how you want to volunteer your time and expertise. You can choose from many options: join our mailing list, volunteer, suggest ideas, become a partner, or assist with financing. You can find the form here.
Like us on Facebook to contribute ideas and spread the word about the work we’re doing at LCDC 14^th & U.
Follow us on twitter to stay up to date on events around the block.
Read our biweekly blog posts to learn about the many ways LCDC 14^th & U is involved in the neighborhood here .

If you would like to stay abreast of the progress in the various Living City Block projects be sure to check out: (these would all be hyper links)

● Living City Block’s Website

● Living City Block’s Facebook

● Living City Block’s Twitter

● Living City Brookly Gowanus Website

● Living City Brookly Gowanus Facebook

● Living City Brookly Gowanus Twitter

● Living City Denver LoDo’s Website

What interventions work across the triple bottom line?

Imagine a beautiful set of buildings that produce more energy than they use. Imagine them out in the middle of a stunning mountain valley; it’s a perfect retreat. They don’t even allow cars on this imaginary campus. Idyllic.

Except for the problem that nobody actually lives in this imaginary place, and most of the visitors have to fly in. You could say it’s hypothetically a model of sustainability. It could even be a community of sorts – at least a temporary and isolated one. If the visitors pay money and the buildings were built from an integrated approach, it might even make a clear business-case. But this idea is very far from a Living City Block because it is not a livable community.

One of the biggest contributions of the Living City Block model is looking at urban communities from an integrated perspective: We want to address issues related to sustainability and have that also create a clear economic impact, as well as make the neighborhood a stronger community. In my imaginary example, only two legs of our stool were addressed: sustainability and economy.

Surely it’s possible to succeed in one dimension without the others – there are many examples of isolated sustainability, and great economic success, without community building. And perhaps it’s also possible to create a vibrant community that is not very sustainable; a place that depends on a polluting industry, or a place where everyone is forced to have a car, etc. But when we look at helping existing neighborhoods generate a Living City Block, we recognize that all three dimensions must be equally served.

One of our basic challenges at Living City Block is working with community leaders, businesses and sustainability experts to identify a set of projects, specific to that neighborhood, that impact all three areas at once. By making a key building more efficient, or working to transform a street into a vibrant place for community interaction, are we also really creating an opportunity for more local jobs? Are we just increasing traffic? We ask these questions in earnest and only detailed answers help us take the next step.