From Executive Director, Brianne Dornbush:
Growing up, my dad was a pastor and all too often my siblings and I would find ourselves the main characters in his sermon illustrations. These stories were sometimes embarrassing and often funny but their purpose was always to illustrate a point or communicate something poignant.
Storytelling is built into the very fiber of our humanity. The earliest humans drew pictures that illustrated the stories and experiences of their daily lives. Stories are powerful tools that can transcend the barriers that often seem to separate us from each other. Stories bring us together.
I love telling stories about the early days of District Bridges. The picture below is of a letter of support from the daughter of our Board Chair in 2016, Chris Seek. His daughter Maya ( age 9 at the time) wrote a letter of support for our very first Main Street grant application. The letter included a detailed picture of the lemonade stand that they planned to have at the next Columbia Heights Day Festival.
They pledged $500 – the proceeds of the lemonade stand – in support of our soon-to-be-founded Columbia Heights | Mount Pleasant Main Street. I don’t know how many nine-year-olds out there are writing letters of support on behalf of grant applications, but if you want a winning strategy for meaningful support letters I’d say a kid’s lemonade stand pledge letter is a pretty good start.
Another story I love to tell is about the first Columbia Heights Day Festival that I was involved in planning. Months of planning and countless hours of work went into planning the day. But as the week of the festival approached so did a hurricane. The morning of the festival we set up our tents, tables, stage, and yes, even inflatables in the pouring rain. It rained – ALL DAY LONG – and it was one of my favorite festivals and lifetime memories.
We had one volunteer stationed at the main stage with a broom to push off the water that was collecting on top of the tent to make sure the tent didn’t collapse and soak all the musicians. It’s in those crazy, hard, disorganized, messy, and grassroots moments where stories become memories. It’s the sopping wet shoes, soaking wet hair and clothes, and ear to ear smiles and laughs that build friendships and community. For those who have joined later on in our story they get to hear those early days stories and find their own place in the story that continues on today.
Story has been one of District Bridges’ core values since the very beginning because it’s essential to building equitable, resilient, connected communities.
The field of community development has often left a lot of people out. When people are not able to tell their stories or use their voice they can feel disconnected from their community. Washington, DC, like many US cities, has a dark history of systematically displacing and disenfranchisement people from their communities. Today, we see this dynamic play out in our most rapidly gentrifying communities.
Washington DC is an incredibly diverse city with so many different perspectives, stories, influences, and ideas. To pursue holistic community development requires that we weave the stories of many different people and stakeholders together and help people find themselves in the narrative of the community at large. Empowering people to tell their stories enables us to see our own experiences through a new lens. It gives us perspective into areas of disagreement or conflict. Each person’s story is their own but it’s the patchwork of all of our stories woven together that makes a neighborhood transform from simply a place into a community.
District Bridges strives to empower our communities to tell their own stories. We don’t want people to fit into neat little narratives. We want to face the reality of community development, the good – the bad, and the ugly, head-on. Our communities deserve that, we deserve that.
