District fifth grader Rayne White recently started another school year after what she described as an uneventful summer where she had more free time at home than what’s healthy for a young person living in the nation’s capital.
That void, Rayne said, stemmed from the closure of the Shaw Community Center, the place where she and her older siblings spent hours upon hours playing with friends, learning new skills, and expanding their horizons.
“It’s been boring, it’s been sad,” Rayne told The Informer. “I miss my friends, I miss all the teachers there, I miss doing activities [like] coding, art, cooking, dance, music, and karate. This summer, I chilled out in the house, read books, and did schoolwork, [but] Shaw Community Center could have made my summer better by helping me learn new activities and socialize with my friends.”
After more than 30 years, Shaw Community Center, based in Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ on 11th Street NW, ceased operations last October amid board leadership changes that sparked tensions and unsuccessful efforts to raise funds. A new tenant, The Elephant Free School, has since moved into Lincoln Temple with the aim of addressing the forces that spurred Shaw Community Center’s closure, and the overall displacement of Black people from Shaw.
Rayne, the youngest of three siblings in one of Shaw’s remaining Black families, spent a significant part of her life at Shaw Community Center during after-school hours and throughout her spring and summer breaks. While her mother worked, she and other youth from the neighborhood went on field trips to the National Zoo, Massanutten Resort in Rockingham County, Virginia, and Great Wolf Lodge in Perryville, Maryland.
Other intimate moments, Rayne said, unfolded in the computer lab and community garden.
“We got to grow corn, lettuce, and pumpkins,” Rayne told The Informer. “I didn’t really know anything. All I knew about gardening was flowers.”
As Rayne, an aspiring attorney, pointed out, Shaw Community Center would’ve provided some more opportunity for enrichment this fall, including a dance number she and her friends would’ve practiced in preparation for Art All Night on Sept 11-12.
“I think my friends feel sad and lonely,” Rayne said. “A community center is important to help kids in need, and help them become better people [with] the love and support that they need because they might not have it at home. We need our community center back.”
Introducing The Elephant Free School
On Oct. 10, The Elephant Free School will host a fall festival that marks not only the launch of its program, but also the continuation of a relationship that started 40 years ago when founder Dominic T. Moulden served the Shaw community as a tenant organizer.
“When they knew [the Shaw Community Center] would sunset, they knew that I was actually doing this kind of work around the world…it was like, ‘Oh, we want to talk with you,’” Moulden told The Informer. “I’ll come back…to provide what is a gap, and that gap is the ocean and everybody that’s filling in the gap. We want to use our water as a resource to keep people in Shaw, and potentially even bring people back to Shaw, but also to build the political, cultural, and educational power that we need in the community.”
Since 2020, The Elephant Free School has organized with communities across the world in the fight for autonomous land control, all while teaching solidarity economics and collective leadership models. Moulden said that movement will continue at Lincoln Temple in collaboration with: Ward 6 Mutual Aid/Serve Your City, high school student interns from the surrounding community, and the Center for Social Housing and Public Investment among other entities.
Programming, geared primarily toward working-class Black community members of all ages, will include creative writing, yoga, tai chi, capoeira, art, theater, and gardening. Grassroots organizations will also get a chance to apply for grants to conduct their own programming, all while community members tap into a community library with an archive of Moulden’s ethnographic photography going back to the mid-1980s.
Moulden, a member of ONE DC’s Right to Resource hub, called this cocktail of amenities part of a greater effort to equip community members, and especially youth, with the tools to do what he couldn’t do as an organizer.
“If young people show up now and come to the Elephant Freedom School, they’re going to know a lot more than I knew in my first 15 years, because nobody was allowed to talk about it,” Moulden said. “You weren’t allowed to question the change. If you talked about it, you would [be] considered crazy and anti-development or anti-change. If you talked about, ‘Well, D.C. is no longer Chocolate City,’ you might be characterized as anti-white. But meanwhile, your people are being seriously harmed.”
Khadijah Huggins-El, a mother of three and longtime Shaw resident, said she can speak to the very phenomenon that Moulden described. In her role as The Elephant Free School’s building operations manager, she plans to facilitate the upkeep of Lincoln Temple and give walking tours to ensure that residents appreciate the historic church’s connection with the likes of Alexander Crummell, Marian Anderson, Roberta Flack, Julian Bond, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“It’s going to give the community the resilience and education that they need to build resilience so that we can stay maintained in this area,” Huggins-El told The Informer. “We’re going to do fundraisers. We’re going to give back to the community. We’re going to have programs for the children as well. That’s my vision for The Elephant Free School.”
For Will Merrifield, The Elephant Free School will serve as a think tank around the production of social housing, a policy idea he said he helped D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) shape years prior. Through the Center for Social Housing and Public Investment, Merrifield, founder of the organization, aims to engage working-class Black Shaw residents in the creation of a document that guides discussion about housing development.
“It’s very important that, as a think tank, the Center for Social Housing and Public Investment creates hard documents so that we’re not making this idea of social housing some hashtag that activists use or that politicians throw around,” Merrifield told The Informer. “That we are creating a concrete perception of what that is and how it would function, and that while we are creating that concrete document, which we aim to do in one to one-and-a-half years, we’re using this space and other spaces around the city to make sure that we’re in constant communication with community members.”
Merrifield, a former tenant association attorney and former at-large D.C. Council candidate, brings to the table his experiences representing tenant associations and combating displacement. He told The Informer that, amid conversations about delinquent tenants and a developer exodus from the District, lawmakers often overlook how housing in the District functions as a cash cow for development rather than a public good.
That’s why, in collaboration with The Elephant Free School, Merrifield aims to shift that paradigm.
“We’re hearing about people’s experiences. We are hearing people’s opinions and we’re incorporating that into a curriculum to build political will,” Merrifield told The Informer. “To collaboratively come up with solutions to the housing crisis so that people in Washington, D.C. are being invested in, and we’re not just investing in buildings. We’re not just investing in showcase projects and making a lot of money for investors and developers.”
Bridging the Gap
In the aftermath of Shaw Community Center’s closure, a board member who requested anonymity pointed out the potential for an equally, if not more potent force, for the Shaw community via The Elephant Free School.
“Once we realized that this version of this work was going to be laid to rest, our next thing was how do we make sure that some kind of services and support could be provided in that building,” the board member said. “That is a historic building, and we did not want the work that was being done in that building to be lost or it become another new high-rise condo building in Shaw.”
In 1991, Lincoln Temple, based on 11th Street in Northwest, founded Shaw Community Center, originally named the Shaw Community Ministry. The entity operated on the ground floor of Lincoln Westmoreland Housing on 7th Street in Northwest for more than 20 years before programming moved to Lincoln Congregational Temple in 2013.
Under the leadership of Sudi West, the Shaw Community Ministry became Shaw Community Center in 2014 and increased its operating budget to $1 million with the help of a development director. More than a dozen staff members facilitated year-round and summer programming for more than 120 young people from Lincoln Westmoreland Housing and other affordable housing communities.
In later years, immigrant families from Africa and Latin America also got to enjoy a slew of programming, including mentoring and a safety plan executed in collaboration with Metropolitan Police Department’s Third District Headquarters.
For the board, Shaw Community Center became the embodiment of family.
“It really felt like a Black home. Seeing all the Black kids just full of joy and be carefree as they deserve to be,” the board member told The Informer. “Our Black kids in the city are criminalized in ways that are extremely detrimental to their well-being, but to see kids have a space to be kids and dance with their friends and laugh and want to share with one another, I saw in real time.”
In speaking about the circumstances surrounding Shaw Community Center’s closure, the board member said the organization faced financial troubles that prevented it from employing community elders and providing free programming to youth in the Shaw area.
“We had some really great foundations in the area that fund afterschool programs and have funded us for years, but our over-reliance on that made us vulnerable,” they said. “So, when that funding was reduced because of factors that…might have reduced how much they were able to distribute, we’re now left vulnerable because we haven’t cultivated individual donors and other sources of revenue.”
The board member likened Shaw Community Center’s problems to issues facing other community hubs serving a majority-Black population. Even as they acknowledged more than could’ve been done to maintain local relationships with potential investors, they said that the ideal fundraising strategy would have to take into account racial and cultural barriers.
“If you know somebody, you’ll get the funding, and if you don’t, you’re kind of left out of the cold,” the board member told The Informer. “Then the same thing is, if you’re going to get the funding, you have to play by that funder’s rules, so there’s also a piece of it in which you have to kind of mold yourself to fit the desires of the funder, and sometimes that means you have to compromise things.”
Months after Shaw Community Center’s closure, Mary Kathryn Sagastume continues to question what will become of the youth and families that depended on the site as a place of refuge.
“So much of the heart behind this center is giving these kids a really safe and loving place to spend their time after school,” said Sagastume, a former Shaw Community Center contractor. “We all live in D.C. We know that we all have to work to survive here. I just thought about [whether they] are getting placed into other programs? Just thinking about the aftercare and where the parents were going to send the kids.”
In 2021, Sagastume started volunteering at Shaw Community Center, where she helped children of different ages grow crops in the community garden. While in the space, which they called “The Promised Garden,” Sagastume led groups of 10 students in chants to orient them to their gardening work before they tended to the soil and engaged in conversation about the work it took to grow vegetables and, much similarity, foster a sense of community.
“It ended up being such a really nice kind of just oasis for the kids to come outside and get their hands dirty,” Sagastume told The Informer. “Sometimes we had to be indoors and get creative with our lessons. Everybody [was] on the same page about we’re here to dream big, but we’re here to get our hands dirty and try something new, something that’s probably different.”
Sagastume said she learned just as much from the students as they learned from her.
“No matter what was happening at school, home or just in the politics of our world and city, they came into the Shaw Community Center and they knew they were at home,” Sagastume said. “The garden got to be part of that too…They had a lot of pride over the stuff they would grow…They were really respectful because the teachers…had high expectations of these kids.”
A Shaw Parent Gets Real
Javon Dabney, a Shaw Community Center parent of more than two decades, said there could’ve been more done to save the local institution.
“We had a solution to get Shaw [to stay open], but the people that wanted the dissolution didn’t care about Shaw,” said Dabney, a second-generation Washingtonian who served as a Shaw Community Center employee and board member. “They weren’t from Shaw. They don’t know Shaw. They only know Shaw from coming in voluntarily here.”
Looking forward, she said that community members must take any future ventures into their own hands.
“When you have boards, people should know the history [of the community] and have some type of connection and not just word of mouth or be hired by someone,” Dabney told The Informer. “The new board next time needs to be more active with the community and with the children in the center to actually know what’s going on.”
As Dabney, the mother of Rayne White, recounted, her family’s relationship with Shaw Community Center dates back to the early 2000s, when the nonprofit took over the community programming at Lincoln Westmoreland Housing. Her sons, now in their 20s, started participating in aftercare as elementary school students.
In the years that followed, Dabney and her children maintained ties with Shaw Community Center, even after its move to Lincoln Temple. She said she depended on staff members to watch over and enrich her children as she worked long hours.
With Shaw Community Center no longer of service to Rayne, Dabney frets about what’s next.
“I have a lot of mixed emotions. Our kids have nothing to do,” Dabney told The Informer. “Our future that we look for for our children has been tainted. We gave scholarships. We sent kids to school. We showed them things. We took them places that they might not ever get to see. We used to have comfort meals. We had a safety outlet. We were family, and [the] family has been broken.”
