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ONE DC Initial Board of Directors
Deanna Brown, SEA Leader David Domenici, Executive Director, See Forever Foundation Virginia Lee, SEDI Leader Jair Lynch, Chief Executive, Jair Lynch Companies Linnette Robinson, SEA Leader
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Advisory Committee
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ONE DC Staff
We are always searching for talented and committed organizers and popular educators!
María Firmino-Castillo Senior Community Organizer/Participatory Researcher María was born in Guatemala to a mother from the eastern border town of Jerez, and an Italian father who moved to Guatemala in the 1950’s in search of work. As political violence erupted, her family moved to the United States. María’s mother died during a high point in the Guatemalan civil war, expressing remorse for not having stayed in Guatemala to join her people’s struggle. This unsatisfied desire to participate in the construction of a better world compelled María to seek her own way to fulfill this aspiration through the vehicles of art, activism, participatory and action research, and popular education. In 1994, María returned to Guatemala to conduct fieldwork toward a doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology. She explored how the Guatemalan student movement subverted the state’s criminalization of dissent through a century-old tradition of protest called La Huelga de Dolores or, in English, The Strike of Sorrows. The streets of Guatemala, where the carnavalesque Huelga is held yearly, is where María first encountered popular education and its potential to unveil the discourses of power, so they can be questioned and changed. Though María left academia in 2000 for reasons that were both practical and existential, she produced videos and articles on the post-war situation in Guatemala, and earned a Master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of New Mexico. The popular education approaches María observed and wrote about on the streets of Guatemala became the mainstay of her work experiences since leaving graduate school. She has coordinated trainings in the areas of policy advocacy and coalition building for a national health justice organization, and conducted workshops in creative writing and art in Washington, DC’s Spanish speaking community. For several years, she worked as a teacher at an experimental public charter school of the arts, and later at a charter high school for public policy, where she taught both public policy and Spanish literature to immigrant students. Using an action-research model, she developed a critical pedagogy through which students re-conceptualized their experiences into narratives with which they defined their selves, their lives, and potentially, their personal and collective futures. Through what has inexorably been a mutual learning experience, María’s students gifted her with a life-long engagement in the type of education that builds the knowledge and skills needed to transform both self and world. María will help further ONE-DC’s work by serving as a community organizer and participatory researcher for the Latino and greater Washington, DC communities.
David Haiman Associate Director
David Haiman is the Associate Director and Interim Community Organizing Director at ONE DC. In the latter capacity, he works with community residents and the ONE DC Organizing Team to initiate, fund, and grow new organizing projects to increase residents’ control over development in their neighborhood and to increase the community’s capacity for sustainable organizing that addresses long-term, systemic issues of poverty. Prior to his work at the ONE DC, David received his Master’s Degrees in Social Work and Public Policy from the University of Michigan and was a community organizer in the Phoenix area in Arizona.
Dominic T. Moulden Executive Director Dominic has been organizing since his teen years in East Baltimore. Born and raised in a neighborhood with a median income of $10,000 to $15,000 per household, he became aware early in life of the impact of the systems and institutions that support and maintain poverty. Dominic came to the ONE DC with extensive experience as a manager, classroom teacher, and religious leader and educator, who struggled to keep organizations and institutions accountable to their mission and principles—a task that brought clarity to the tensions between an organization’s institutional interest in survival and the larger goals that are the reasons for its existence. One of the most difficult losses Dominic has endured was the battle against the Roman Catholic Church to maintain five schools educating very low-income and working poor families. One of the five schools, Mackin Catholic, had an 85% success rate in student graduation and an equal rate of college bound students. Such accomplishments came during the mid-1980s when the city was faced with its most severe drug and crime crisis. Dominic helped his church organize teachers, parents, and students in support of the schools, but the Archdiocese power brokers voted against the community’s interests and stopped educating the very people whom the Church was committed to serve. When asked about his greatest victory, Dominic describes the time when working class and low-income leaders of ONE DC’s Shaw Education for Action project composed their own public testimony and appeared before the D.C. City Council and Housing Department to voice their research, opinions and alternative solutions regarding affordable housing legislation and public funding for affordable housing. One of those leaders, Linette Robinson, whose son was killed in Shaw, went on to receive the 2003 Dorothy Richardson Award from Neighborhood Reinvestment for her quiet but powerful witness to resident-led organizing and leadership. The efforts of these leaders resulted in full funding for the District’s Housing Production Trust Fund. As a team manager, Dominic believes in “building,” whether it means a movement for equitable development and justice, the capacity of community members to participate in meaningful change, the justice values of the Shaw neighborhood, or a staff committed to excellence and progressive thinking.
Gloria Robinson Tenant-Based Community Organizer Ms. Robinson has been a member of the ONE DC staff for the past 9 years with long standing personal ties to the Shaw community. She serves as a Tenant-Based Community Organizer working on issues of social and economic justice, grassroots leadership development, tenant organizing and neighborhood revitalization. Ms. Robinson is currently a member of the ONE DC team providing training on Section 8 Tenants Rights to 11 project-based Section 8 properties in Shaw. Ms. Robinson has received intensive training in Leadership Development, Community Organizing and Popular Education from the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, the Highlander Institute, The Praxis Project, and the Industrial Areas Foundation.
Jessica Rucker Community Organizing and Popular Education Fellow Jessica Rucker is a native Washingtonian who has been actively organizing around issues of social change since her high school years. She has maintained an unyielding drive towards developing community capacity since she learned the true meaning of the term. Jessica has worked with various local organizations that address poverty, racism, academic/public school reform, and gender discrimination. She has also used the art of Spoken Word as a tool to encourage women, children and youth of color to mobilize around social justice and to claim what is theirs by any means necessary. She currently works with Martha’s Table as an after-school enrichment specialist, tutoring and mentoring Black and Latino youth from overexploited and underrepresented communities in the District. As the Community Organizing and Popular Education Fellow, she will work collaboratively with the residents of the Shaw community; assist in the process of writing popular education materials and workshop facilitation; and provide support for initiatives to serve the Shaw community beneficially. Jessica has a B.A. in Sociology from Georgetown University. She anticipates her future with ONE DC to be long and productive.
Janelle Treibitz Arts & Culture Organizer
Andrew Willis Community Organizer/Popular Educator
Andrew lived in Memphis, TN; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Ft. Lauderdale, FL before coming to the District in 2001 to earn degrees in International Relations and Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University. Prior to ONEDC he was a researcher with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where he supported national organizing campaigns of low-wage janitors and security guards. In addition to student and international solidarity movement organizing he has volunteered for a number of local advocacy and activist groups.
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ONE DC Consultants & Interns
Nicole Bates Howard University Intern Nicole is currently a junior at Howard University double majoring in English and Political Science with a minor in community development. She is originally from Long Beach, California by way of Chicago. This is her first time doing community organizing and being exposed to a lot of the issues around affordable housing, living wage jobs, and land. But she has always been involved in her community mainly through her local church, working in the outreach ministry, food and clothing distribution ministry, and youth mentorship program. Upon graduation she plans to first work in the juvenile justice system as a defense attorney representing kids who have been marginalized and stripped of their voices. She then plans to initiate a nonprofit that deals with helping these kids get access to materials and resources that will better prepare them for college or whatever career path they decide to take.
Martha Davis Housing Development Consultant Martha has worked in non-profit real estate development since 1986 with a focus on affordable housing co-op development. At ONE DC she is supporting the creation and preservation of affordable co-op, condo, and rental housing in the Shaw and DC, particularly through development partnerships. She also authored ONE DC’s Changing Faces of Shaw publication to illuminate gentrification trends affecting Shaw. As a consultant with other non-profits, she has managed development projects for Bread for the City, Dance Institute of Washington, See Forever, New Columbia Land Trust, and the Fishing School, and writing projects for the Coalition for Non-Profit Housing and Economic Development, National Mutual Housing Network, Bernan Press, and National Co-op Business Association. Martha was the housing development director at Washington Innercity Self Help (WISH) for 11 years, building its co-op development program and managing eight tenant co-op conversion projects with 160 units. She has done overseas consulting work in Hungary for the Urban Institute and in South Africa for WISH.
Melissa Johnson Howard University Intern Melissa Johnson is currently a student at Howard University majoring on business management and community development. Originally from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, she has a great passion for community organizing and activism and views it as the only way to transform cities and empower people. Upon completion of her studies at Howard University, she plans to begin a community development corporation in East Cleveland, Ohio to insure the education, progressive organizing and equitable development of the city. While at ONE DC, Melissa works with the Equitable Development Initiative (EDI) and Shaw Education for Action (SEA). She is also coordinating ways to help college students become more involved with community initiatives and to lend their support to solve problems plaguing their underrepresented families in Shaw and the District.
Mark Robinson DC Organizing Initiative Consultant Mark Robinson is the founder and chief operating officer of Robinson & Associates, a community building and training organization. He is the former director of community building and leadership development at IMPACT Silver Spring, a community development organization located in Silver Spring Maryland that has trained over 150 community leaders in leadership, community organizing, negotiation and planning. He has more than 20 years experience in the areas of conflict resolution, community organizing, program administration, and organizational development. Previously, he was a NeighborWorks America training consultant, and before that he coordinated domestic projects for Pact; an international development organization headquartered in Washington, DC. Robinson has also worked as outreach director for multicultural community services and was a community organizer for several community-based organizations, including the Mid-Northeast Collaborative and The New Community Family Place. In addition, he is the former director of the District of Columbia Mediation Service. In addition to his work in the fields of Community Building and Community Organizing, Robinson is the Head Cross Country Coach for Catholic University in Washington, DC.
Michael Swartzbeck Publication Layout & Illustration Consultant mike@swartzbeck.com
Since his involvement with DC local "zines" and producing poster art for local peace and justice activists in the late '70s, Mike's art has been ubiquitous in the streets and the alternative press—including the DC Independent Media Center and DC Statehood Greens—and has helped to define the "style" of modern activist publishing and popular education.
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