Yasmine Arrington Brooks Founder and Executive Director, ScholarCHIPS “What pisses you guys off?” Fifteen-year-old Yasmine Arrington didn’t have to search for an answer when the leader of an afterschool program she’d been attending on social entrepreneurship posed the question. Her fath er had been in and out of prison since she was a toddler, and she and her brothers were raised by their grandmother after their mom died when Yasmine was 13. The lack of resources for the children of incarcerated parents had long disturbed the Banneker High School junior. Her grandmother had been researching college financial aid for her grand-daughter and noted the lack of scholarships for kids like Yasmine—those living with a void, with family complications, of-ten with shame. So when asked to present, Shark Tank–style, a solution to the issue that irked her, “I kind of put two and two together,” Arrington Brooks says. Before a panel from LearnServe, the nonprofit that ran the afterschool sessions, she proposed a scholarship/mentorship program for those with a parent in prison. The clever name—ScholarCHIPS, for Children of Incarcerated Parents—came courtesy of Grandma. The panel was so wowed that it urged the teen to make her imaginary nonprofit a reality, and LearnServe helped her get it started. Through her senior year of high school, college at Elon University, and graduate studies at Howard University’s divinity school—her own college journey made possible in part by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation—Arrington Brooks built her idea into an actual nonprofit. Since 2012, it has awarded more than $600,000 to 123 students, mostly from the Washington area, who attend colleges all over, from Bowie State to UCLA. Her scholars, she says, face the same challenges as other college freshmen, “but it’s amplified because of the lack of familial and financial support—they really have little to no resources.” Arrington Brooks, who runs ScholarCHIPS out of her Northeast DC home, was recognized in 2023 as one of CNN’s Top Ten Heroes. But the most rewarding recognition, she says, comes from the 56 ScholarCHIPS graduates now pursuing careers in such fields as law or speech therapy or engineering. She has attended a number of their college graduations. She’s usually the one cheering the loudest and crying the hardest.   Jean-Michel Giraud President and CEO, Friendship Place Jean-Michel Giraud has made it his life’s work to help people find stability, dignity, and a place to call home. His path to leading Friendship Place—one of the region’s most effective nonprofits working to end homelessness—began in 1982 on the midnight shift at a Massachusetts residential facility, where he helped people with severe developmental and behavioral disabilities rebuild their lives. It was there, working with individuals who’d been institutionalized for decades, that he realized the mental-health community had to create more humane, person-centered solutions. “That’s been a driving factor for me throughout my career,” he says. Giraud joined Friendship Place in 2006, when it was a small nonprofit operating a few transitional houses for single men experiencing homelessness. He had a $1 million budget and fewer than 20 employees. Today, Friendship Place has a budget of $24 million and a staff of 170. Last year, it served more than 5,400 people—including roughly 1,100 chronically homeless single adults and 776 veterans and families—across the DC region. “With a good team that does good work, you really can move the needle,” he says. What keeps him going after so many years doing this work? Giraud says he’s driven by a belief in social justice and a deep sense of responsibility to improve people’s lives: “I have to serve, to help people. It sounds almost too simple, but it’s really what motivates me.” Under Giraud’s leadership, Friendship Place has received local and national recognition for its success in reducing homelessness. He credits that to the organization’s adoption of the “housing first” model, which places people into homes without preconditions such as sobriety or employment. The model, he says, removes “moral judgment” from the process of seeking help. Denying housing because of substance use, he argues, only keeps people trapped in a cycle of instability. Removing those barriers has led to a 97-percent housing retention rate in the organization’s permanent-supportive-housing programs and a 95-percent success rate for veteran households. “People don’t understand that ‘housing first’ doesn’t mean you ignore addiction needs,” Giraud says. “You just address them in a different way.”   Judith Sandalow CEO, Children’s Law Center Fresh out of law school, Judith Sandalow worked in DC as a juvenile criminal-defense attorney. She met many kids who faced serious criminal charges, but she advocated for them to get the services they needed, such as being placed in a residential treatment center instead of jail. One young man grew up to become a substance-abuse counselor. His high-school graduation photo now hangs in Sandalow’s office at the Children’s Law Center, which she’s led for 25 years. In this role, she focuses less on juvenile crime and more on addressing the unequal opportunity that often belies it. “Kids need to be healthy, they need to get a good education, and they need family stability,” Sandalow says. “How can the law be a tool to get them the things they need?” When she was tapped to run the center—where she was one of three employees at the time—Sandalow had special insight as the mother of two foster children. She’s since expanded the staff to more than 100 attorneys, investigators, and social workers. With the help of pro bono lawyers, the center now serves over 5,000 area kids and families every year. Sandalow initiated a contract with DC’s local court to provide legal representation to youth in foster care. Today, the Children’s Law Center represents more than half of the DC children in foster care. Thanks to her advocacy, the District was the first city in the nation to adopt a guardianship law, which helps children exit foster care to grandparents and other relatives more easily. The group was also behind legislation requiring landlords to promptly address mold, a move instigated by unsafe living conditions that were exacerbating asthma symptoms in kids. The organization pushed schools to provide speedier learning-disability testing to struggling students, and it advocates for anti-suspension policies. Sandalow has learned that many children enter foster care simply because their parents lack financial resources. In 2024, the center launched a program called Families Together, which aims to ease the burden of poverty by helping parents navigate public benefits or advocate for improved housing conditions. “If you’re on a lifeboat in 20-foot waves, teaching a child or a family to swim—they’re not going to be able to swim out of the storm,” she says. “We have to calm the waters.”   Mark Ein Investor, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist Mark Ein is arguably the person for whom the phrase “wears many hats” was invented. He’s chairman and CEO of the local investment firm Venturehouse Group. He’s executive chairman of Kastle Systems, the country’s leading provider of commercial security systems. He’s the owner of Washington City Paper, which he purchased in 2017 to save it from peril. He’s chairman of the DC Public Education Fund, which has raised more than $250 million from Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and other business and civic A-listers to support students and recognize outstanding teachers in the District’s public schools. He helped start the DC Policy Center, a think tank focused on expanding economic activity in the city. And, lest we forget, he was one of a select group leading the charge in 2023 to buy the Washington Commanders—and set in motion a plan to bring the team’s home games back downtown by the end of the decade. “Those were the best memories of my youth,” says Ein, recalling the football games he attended at RFK Stadium. Section 320, row 5, seats 19 and 20, in the end zone. That’s where he sat with his father, cheering on the home team as they marched to multiple Super Bowl titles. For Ein, sports sits at the nexus of his involvement in civic leadership, business, and philanthropy. When the Citi Open, the annual professional tennis tournament in Rock Creek Park, was on the verge of being moved from DC, Ein stepped in, as he did with the Commanders, and took over management in 2019. “Both are huge platforms that impact huge numbers of people in our community,” he says. “And so now being in a position of leadership in both, it’s an incredible feeling.” Shepherding the tennis tournament is especially meaningful, as it benefits the Washington Tennis Education Foundation. Ein was once captain of Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School’s tennis team, an experience, he says, that taught him lessons about fair play, discipline, and self-reliance. After all, on the tennis court, you can’t be substituted out. “That feeling I had as a kid has stuck with me at so many moments in my life,” says Ein. “So I loved using the sport as a platform for other kids.”   Christopher Bradshaw Founder and Executive Director, Dreaming Out Loud Christopher Bradshaw grew up watching the way food can build community. In his hometown of Morristown, Tennessee, he helped an uncle grow and harvest squash, okra, and other vegetables, and he says his family “would share the food with neighbors and others who would stop by and talk and hang out.” With a mother who worked as a community organizer, Bradshaw knew he wanted a life in social justice but wasn’t sure where he could make his mark. He moved to Washington to attend Howard University as a business major and began working with summer youth programs in his spare time. In 2008, that passion led him to start a nonprofit, Dreaming Out Loud, which found unexpected direction when he struggled to find healthy snacks for sale in the community for his afterschool students. Remembering his upbringing, Bradshaw says he wanted to use Dreaming Out Loud to reconnect people with “heritage foodways, the ways we traditionally use food as community-building and nourishment.” Southeast DC residents have few options for grocery stores and little access to healthy food. The organization addressed the area’s food needs at first by operating farmers markets and then by launching two urban farms in Wards 7 and 8. Dreaming Out Loud became a farm-to-school distributor to bring fruits and vegetables to DC-area public schools. It also began a community-supported agriculture (CSA) service to deliver fresh groceries. Still, Bradshaw had even bigger dreams to connect east-of-the-Anacostia-River residents with fresh food. In September, Dreaming Out Loud opened its first full-service grocery store and community space, Marion Barry Avenue Market and Cafe, in Southeast. Much of the produce is from local farms. “Watching people’s faces when they walk in for the first time? I love that,” Bradshaw says. “Long term, I want to prove that we can do things ourselves, feed ourselves, and build some sustainable models that can generate revenue, that can sustain and build community.”   Aza Nedhari Cofounder and Executive Director, Mamatoto Village Artwork by Lauren Turner. Twenty years ago, a mid-wife helped Aza Nedhari deliver her first baby. The experience was so enlightening that Nedhari, who was a public-health worker, trained to become a midwife herself. That expertise in midwifery unlocked a deeper understanding around the high death rates for Black mothers and infants, and in 2009, when she lost her job during the recession, she decided to focus full-time on combating this inequality. Babies born to Black moms in DC are five times likelier to die during their first year than those born to white mothers. Mamatoto Village, founded by Nedhari and Cassietta Pringle, has been working to remedy this disparity since it opened in 2013. Named for a Swahili word that translates to “motherbaby,” the organization aims to eradicate these health disparities by supporting Black parents from pregnancy through their baby’s early life. It does that by offering free and low-cost prenatal and postpartum care; childbirth and parenting education; and breastfeeding support. In 2024, 30 percent of Black mothers in the District were receiving inadequate prenatal care. Through its robust home-visit program, Mamatoto takes its services straight to the homes of expectant parents, hoping to eliminate barriers to access such as transportation and childcare. All of the community-health workers, birth workers, and lactation specialists who provide these services became certified at little or no cost through Mamatoto’s training program. Some of them received Mamatoto’s services when they had their own kids. Not only does this model create jobs within DC’s underserved neighborhoods, but it allows for culturally competent care—a critical mechanism for curbing maternal mortality. Says Nedhari: “The people who do the work reflect the community that’s being served.” Mamatoto has a roughly 85-percent success rate in helping new moms breastfeed. Perhaps more important, Mamatoto has never lost a patient. “Our data and our outcomes are consistent,” Nedhari says. “And that’s really a testament to me and the efforts of all the staff.”   Judy Harris and Norm Ornstein Founders, The Matthew Harris Ornstein Summer Debate Institute The students in the first Matthew Ornstein Memorial Foundation summer debate camp in 2015 knew they were part of something special: For starters, the podiums they stood before, lent by the presidential-debate commission, had been used in 2012 by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Beyond a brush with history, the camp—founded by Judy Harris and Norm Ornstein in memory of their son—offers students, mostly from distressed parts of DC and Prince George’s County, the transformative skills and community that Matthew had found through debate. He’d been a passionate debater, a national champion who, after graduating from Princeton, created a TV comedy show on the subject with his high-school debate partner, Alex Berger. When Matthew died from accidental carbon-monoxide poisoning at age 34, his devastated parents, his brother Danny, and Berger decided a debate camp would be the best way to honor his memory. Today, more than 250 fifth-grade-through-high-school kids a year come to the free camp, run with the cooperation of the Washington Urban Debate League. There are no criteria for admission, but students are asked to join or start debate teams at their schools. The couple has seen the program change lives. One freshman with a GPA under 1.0 graduated with a 3.75 average. All the campers have graduated from high school, and most receive college scholarships. “It’s life skills,” says Ornstein, who’s used his contacts as a prominent political analyst to enlist friends in high places, such as Supreme Court justice Katanji Brown Jackson, to address the campers. Students learn to speak before audiences, do research, write, build knowledge, and develop self-confidence. “Some of these kids are simply brilliant,” he says, “and the brilliance comes out when you give them the tools and the opportunities.” Adds Harris, a lawyer: “For many, it’s the first time anyone’s listened to what they have to say.” Many of the coaches are alumni of the program, and they’ve become family to the couple. One alum visited them at home and asked if she could go to Matthew’s room to “absorb who he was,” Ornstein says. Like Matthew, she’d become a national debate champion. Her first phone call upon learning she’d received a full scholarship to Harvard had been to Matthew’s parents.   Bob Nixon President and CEO, Earth Conservation Corps Bob Nixon’s decades of devotion to the Anacostia River started as a deal. As a young environmental filmmaker, he traveled to Rwanda in 1980 to make a documentary about Dian Fossey and her study of mountain gorillas. He wanted to turn her story into a Hollywood film, and she agreed to cooperate—but only after insisting that Nixon dedicate one year of his life to conservation fieldwork. In 1988, three years after Fossey was murdered, Nixon co-produced the Oscar-nominated film Gorillas in the Mist, based on her life. He wanted to make good on his pledge. Living in Malibu and pursuing a successful film career, Nixon read a news story about America’s most polluted river, the Anacostia. Cleaning it up, he thought, could be his project. In 1992, he came to DC and offered to jump-start the Earth Conservation Corps, a George H.W. Bush–era nonprofit that had never launched. Nixon raised money and recruited teens from the impoverished neighborhoods along the river, paying them a stipend and scholarship money for 11 months of work pulling trash and tires from a garbage-clogged creek. He was struck by the kids’ untapped talent and their desire to help. “They’d never been asked, ever, to do anything positive,” he says. Most shocking, though, was the violence that marked their lives. Months after he’d arrived, the first of his nine recruits was murdered. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not sure I can walk away from this,’ ” he says. He sold his house in Malibu to fund the program, and—33 years, a wife, three children, and hundreds of Corps graduates later—he’s still providing job skills, opportunities, and civic pride to some of the city’s most at-risk kids. The nonprofit has helped clean and revive the river, reintroduced bald eagles and other wildlife, planted trees, created a fish hatchery, and engaged thousands of schoolchildren through ecological classrooms. “What keeps me going is seeing the same spark light up in a new recruit or somebody going out on the river for the first time,” says Nixon. The Georgetown resident chuckles recalling Fossey’s demand for a year of his life: “I don’t know if it was a trick of hers, but it definitely changed my whole life trajectory.”   Ann Friedman Founder and CEO, Planet Word After a brief stint in investment banking, Ann Friedman became a teacher at age 45. When she retired from teaching reading at Bethesda’s Burning Tree Elementary School, she wanted to keep educating. “Here I am with all this expertise in literacy, and I felt like that was so important,” she says. “And everything was going the opposite direction—people were reading less.” In 2012, Friedman saw an article about the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, an interactive space aimed at engaging people with math-related exhibits. She pictured a similar museum in DC, with a focus on language arts, so she convened a team of experts to help her pull off the vision. As it happened, the District government was desperate to find a tenant for the Franklin School, a National Historic Landmark downtown. “I looked at this building that was really deteriorating and said, ‘No, not interested,’ ” Friedman recalls. The city urged her to reconsider. She learned that the school had been the receiving site of Alexander Graham Bell’s first photophone message and that The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett once lived just up the block. Suddenly, it seemed a fated home for a museum exploring the intersection of language and technology. Friedman funded the school’s $35 million restoration and rehabilitation, transforming it into a museum for the language arts. Planet Word opened in 2020 and has become a fixture of DC’s rich museum scene, arriving at a critical time: Literacy rates were already on the decline among American students and have dipped lower since the pandemic. Planet Word’s goal of inspiring a love of language manifests in an array of hands-on, tech-based exhibits. Visitors can make speeches, tell dad jokes, and sing karaoke. Librarians, poets, and other wordsmiths speak on all manner of topics related to language arts, sometimes moderated by journalists and authors, including her husband, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “I hope that something will grab [visitors’] interest that has to do with words and language,” Friedman says. While you’ll see plenty of kids traipsing through the halls, the museum is aimed at all readers. “There are people from every race, every background, every language—and they’re all here having fun and learning together. I love that, and that’s why I like living in Washington, too.” Yasmine Arrington Brooks Founder and Executive Director, ScholarCHIPS “What pisses you guys off?” Fifteen-year-old Yasmine Arrington didn’t have to search for an answer when the leader of an afterschool program she’d been attending on social entrepreneurship posed the question. Her father had been in and out of prison since she was a toddler, and she and her brothers were raised by their grandmother after their mom died when Yasmine was 13. The lack of resources for the children of incarcerated parents had long disturbed the Banneker High School junior. Her grandmother had been researching college financial aid for her grand-daughter and noted the lack of scholarships for kids like Yasmine—those living with a void, with family complications, of-ten with shame. So when asked to present, Shark Tank–style, a solution to the issue that irked her, “I kind of put two and two together,” Arrington Brooks says. Before a panel from LearnServe, the nonprofit that ran the afterschool sessions, she proposed a scholarship/mentorship program for those with a parent in prison. The clever name—ScholarCHIPS, for Children of Incarcerated Parents—came courtesy of Grandma. The panel was so wowed that it urged the teen to make her imaginary nonprofit a reality, and LearnServe helped her get it started. Through her senior year of high school, college at Elon University, and graduate studies at Howard University’s divinity school—her own college journey made possible in part by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation—Arrington Brooks built her idea into an actual nonprofit. Since 2012, it has awarded more than $600,000 to 123 students, mostly from the Washington area, who attend colleges all over, from Bowie State to UCLA. Her scholars, she says, face the same challenges as other college freshmen, “but it’s amplified because of the lack of familial and financial support—they really have little to no resources.” Arrington Brooks, who runs ScholarCHIPS out of her Northeast DC home, was recognized in 2023 as one of CNN’s Top Ten Heroes. But the most rewarding recognition, she says, comes from the 56 ScholarCHIPS graduates now pursuing careers in such fields as law or speech therapy or engineering. She has attended a number of their college graduations. She’s usually the one cheering the loudest and crying the hardest.   Jean-Michel Giraud President and CEO, Friendship Place Jean-Michel Giraud has made it his life’s work to help people find stability, dignity, and a place to call home. His path to leading Friendship Place—one of the region’s most effective nonprofits working to end homelessness—began in 1982 on the midnight shift at a Massachusetts residential facility, where he helped people with severe developmental and behavioral disabilities rebuild their lives. It was there, working with individuals who’d been institutionalized for decades, that he realized the mental-health community had to create more humane, person-centered solutions. “That’s been a driving factor for me throughout my career,” he says. Giraud joined Friendship Place in 2006, when it was a small nonprofit operating a few transitional houses for single men experiencing homelessness. He had a $1 million budget and fewer than 20 employees. Today, Friendship Place has a budget of $24 million and a staff of 170. Last year, it served more than 5,400 people—including roughly 1,100 chronically homeless single adults and 776 veterans and families—across the DC region. “With a good team that does good work, you really can move the needle,” he says. What keeps him going after so many years doing this work? Giraud says he’s driven by a belief in social justice and a deep sense of responsibility to improve people’s lives: “I have to serve, to help people. It sounds almost too simple, but it’s really what motivates me.” Under Giraud’s leadership, Friendship Place has received local and national recognition for its success in reducing homelessness. He credits that to the organization’s adoption of the “housing first” model, which places people into homes without preconditions such as sobriety or employment. The model, he says, removes “moral judgment” from the process of seeking help. Denying housing because of substance use, he argues, only keeps people trapped in a cycle of instability. Removing those barriers has led to a 97-percent housing retention rate in the organization’s permanent-supportive-housing programs and a 95-percent success rate for veteran households. “People don’t understand that ‘housing first’ doesn’t mean you ignore addiction needs,” Giraud says. “You just address them in a different way.”   Judith Sandalow CEO, Children’s Law Center Fresh out of law school, Judith Sandalow worked in DC as a juvenile criminal-defense attorney. She met many kids who faced serious criminal charges, but she advocated for them to get the services they needed, such as being placed in a residential treatment center instead of jail. One young man grew up to become a substance-abuse counselor. His high-school graduation photo now hangs in Sandalow’s office at the Children’s Law Center, which she’s led for 25 years. In this role, she focuses less on juvenile crime and more on addressing the unequal opportunity that often belies it. “Kids need to be healthy, they need to get a good education, and they need family stability,” Sandalow says. “How can the law be a tool to get them the things they need?” When she was tapped to run the center—where she was one of three employees at the time—Sandalow had special insight as the mother of two foster children. She’s since expanded the staff to more than 100 attorneys, investigators, and social workers. With the help of pro bono lawyers, the center now serves over 5,000 area kids and families every year. Sandalow initiated a contract with DC’s local court to provide legal representation to youth in foster care. Today, the Children’s Law Center represents more than half of the DC children in foster care. Thanks to her advocacy, the District was the first city in the nation to adopt a guardianship law, which helps children exit foster care to grandparents and other relatives more easily. The group was also behind legislation requiring landlords to promptly address mold, a move instigated by unsafe living conditions that were exacerbating asthma symptoms in kids. The organization pushed schools to provide speedier learning-disability testing to struggling students, and it advocates for anti-suspension policies. Sandalow has learned that many children enter foster care simply because their parents lack financial resources. In 2024, the center launched a program called Families Together, which aims to ease the burden of poverty by helping parents navigate public benefits or advocate for improved housing conditions. “If you’re on a lifeboat in 20-foot waves, teaching a child or a family to swim—they’re not going to be able to swim out of the storm,” she says. “We have to calm the waters.”   Mark Ein Investor, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist Mark Ein is arguably the person for whom the phrase “wears many hats” was invented. He’s chairman and CEO of the local investment firm Venturehouse Group. He’s executive chairman of Kastle Systems, the country’s leading provider of commercial security systems. He’s the owner of Washington City Paper, which he purchased in 2017 to save it from peril. He’s chairman of the DC Public Education Fund, which has raised more than $250 million from Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and other business and civic A-listers to support students and recognize outstanding teachers in the District’s public schools. He helped start the DC Policy Center, a think tank focused on expanding economic activity in the city. And, lest we forget, he was one of a select group leading the charge in 2023 to buy the Washington Commanders—and set in motion a plan to bring the team’s home games back downtown by the end of the decade. “Those were the best memories of my youth,” says Ein, recalling the football games he attended at RFK Stadium. Section 320, row 5, seats 19 and 20, in the end zone. That’s where he sat with his father, cheering on the home team as they marched to multiple Super Bowl titles. For Ein, sports sits at the nexus of his involvement in civic leadership, business, and philanthropy. When the Citi Open, the annual professional tennis tournament in Rock Creek Park, was on the verge of being moved from DC, Ein stepped in, as he did with the Commanders, and took over management in 2019. “Both are huge platforms that impact huge numbers of people in our community,” he says. “And so now being in a position of leadership in both, it’s an incredible feeling.” Shepherding the tennis tournament is especially meaningful, as it benefits the Washington Tennis Education Foundation. Ein was once captain of Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School’s tennis team, an experience, he says, that taught him lessons about fair play, discipline, and self-reliance. After all, on the tennis court, you can’t be substituted out. “That feeling I had as a kid has stuck with me at so many moments in my life,” says Ein. “So I loved using the sport as a platform for other kids.”   Christopher Bradshaw Founder and Executive Director, Dreaming Out Loud Christopher Bradshaw grew up watching the way food can build community. In his hometown of Morristown, Tennessee, he helped an uncle grow and harvest squash, okra, and other vegetables, and he says his family “would share the food with neighbors and others who would stop by and talk and hang out.” With a mother who worked as a community organizer, Bradshaw knew he wanted a life in social justice but wasn’t sure where he could make his mark. He moved to Washington to attend Howard University as a business major and began working with summer youth programs in his spare time. In 2008, that passion led him to start a nonprofit, Dreaming Out Loud, which found unexpected direction when he struggled to find healthy snacks for sale in the community for his afterschool students. Remembering his upbringing, Bradshaw says he wanted to use Dreaming Out Loud to reconnect people with “heritage foodways, the ways we traditionally use food as community-building and nourishment.” Southeast DC residents have few options for grocery stores and little access to healthy food. The organization addressed the area’s food needs at first by operating farmers markets and then by launching two urban farms in Wards 7 and 8. Dreaming Out Loud became a farm-to-school distributor to bring fruits and vegetables to DC-area public schools. It also began a community-supported agriculture (CSA) service to deliver fresh groceries. Still, Bradshaw had even bigger dreams to connect east-of-the-Anacostia-River residents with fresh food. In September, Dreaming Out Loud opened its first full-service grocery store and community space, Marion Barry Avenue Market and Cafe, in Southeast. Much of the produce is from local farms. “Watching people’s faces when they walk in for the first time? I love that,” Bradshaw says. “Long term, I want to prove that we can do things ourselves, feed ourselves, and build some sustainable models that can generate revenue, that can sustain and build community.”   Artwork by Lauren Turner. Aza Nedhari Cofounder and Executive Director, Mamatoto Village Twenty years ago, a mid-wife helped Aza Nedhari deliver her first baby. The experience was so enlightening that Nedhari, who was a public-health worker, trained to become a midwife herself. That expertise in midwifery unlocked a deeper understanding around the high death rates for Black mothers and infants, and in 2009, when she lost her job during the recession, she decided to focus full-time on combating this inequality. Babies born to Black moms in DC are five times likelier to die during their first year than those born to white mothers. Mamatoto Village, founded by Nedhari and Cassietta Pringle, has been working to remedy this disparity since it opened in 2013. Named for a Swahili word that translates to “motherbaby,” the organization aims to eradicate these health disparities by supporting Black parents from pregnancy through their baby’s early life. It does that by offering free and low-cost prenatal and postpartum care; childbirth and parenting education; and breastfeeding support. In 2024, 30 percent of Black mothers in the District were receiving inadequate prenatal care. Through its robust home-visit program, Mamatoto takes its services straight to the homes of expectant parents, hoping to eliminate barriers to access such as transportation and childcare. All of the community-health workers, birth workers, and lactation specialists who provide these services became certified at little or no cost through Mamatoto’s training program. Some of them received Mamatoto’s services when they had their own kids. Not only does this model create jobs within DC’s underserved neighborhoods, but it allows for culturally competent care—a critical mechanism for curbing maternal mortality. Says Nedhari: “The people who do the work reflect the community that’s being served.” Mamatoto has a roughly 85-percent success rate in helping new moms breastfeed. Perhaps more important, Mamatoto has never lost a patient. “Our data and our outcomes are consistent,” Nedhari says. “And that’s really a testament to me and the efforts of all the staff.”   Judy Harris and Norm Ornstein Founders, The Matthew Harris Ornstein Summer Debate Institute The students in the first Matthew Ornstein Memorial Foundation summer debate camp in 2015 knew they were part of something special: For starters, the podiums they stood before, lent by the presidential-debate commission, had been used in 2012 by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Beyond a brush with history, the camp—founded by Judy Harris and Norm Ornstein in memory of their son—offers students, mostly from distressed parts of DC and Prince George’s County, the transformative skills and community that Matthew had found through debate. He’d been a passionate debater, a national champion who, after graduating from Princeton, created a TV comedy show on the subject with his high-school debate partner, Alex Berger. When Matthew died from accidental carbon-monoxide poisoning at age 34, his devastated parents, his brother Danny, and Berger decided a debate camp would be the best way to honor his memory. Today, more than 250 fifth-grade-through-high-school kids a year come to the free camp, run with the cooperation of the Washington Urban Debate League. There are no criteria for admission, but students are asked to join or start debate teams at their schools. The couple has seen the program change lives. One freshman with a GPA under 1.0 graduated with a 3.75 average. All the campers have graduated from high school, and most receive college scholarships. “It’s life skills,” says Ornstein, who’s used his contacts as a prominent political analyst to enlist friends in high places, such as Supreme Court justice Katanji Brown Jackson, to address the campers. Students learn to speak before audiences, do research, write, build knowledge, and develop self-confidence. “Some of these kids are simply brilliant,” he says, “and the brilliance comes out when you give them the tools and the opportunities.” Adds Harris, a lawyer: “For many, it’s the first time anyone’s listened to what they have to say.” Many of the coaches are alumni of the program, and they’ve become family to the couple. One alum visited them at home and asked if she could go to Matthew’s room to “absorb who he was,” Ornstein says. Like Matthew, she’d become a national debate champion. Her first phone call upon learning she’d received a full scholarship to Harvard had been to Matthew’s parents.   Bob Nixon President and CEO, Earth Conservation Corps Bob Nixon’s decades of devotion to the Anacostia River started as a deal. As a young environmental filmmaker, he traveled to Rwanda in 1980 to make a documentary about Dian Fossey and her study of mountain gorillas. He wanted to turn her story into a Hollywood film, and she agreed to cooperate—but only after insisting that Nixon dedicate one year of his life to conservation fieldwork. In 1988, three years after Fossey was murdered, Nixon co-produced the Oscar-nominated film Gorillas in the Mist, based on her life. He wanted to make good on his pledge. Living in Malibu and pursuing a successful film career, Nixon read a news story about America’s most polluted river, the Anacostia. Cleaning it up, he thought, could be his project. In 1992, he came to DC and offered to jump-start the Earth Conservation Corps, a George H.W. Bush–era nonprofit that had never launched. Nixon raised money and recruited teens from the impoverished neighborhoods along the river, paying them a stipend and scholarship money for 11 months of work pulling trash and tires from a garbage-clogged creek. He was struck by the kids’ untapped talent and their desire to help. “They’d never been asked, ever, to do anything positive,” he says. Most shocking, though, was the violence that marked their lives. Months after he’d arrived, the first of his nine recruits was murdered. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not sure I can walk away from this,’ ” he says. He sold his house in Malibu to fund the program, and—33 years, a wife, three children, and hundreds of Corps graduates later—he’s still providing job skills, opportunities, and civic pride to some of the city’s most at-risk kids. The nonprofit has helped clean and revive the river, reintroduced bald eagles and other wildlife, planted trees, created a fish hatchery, and engaged thousands of schoolchildren through ecological classrooms. “What keeps me going is seeing the same spark light up in a new recruit or somebody going out on the river for the first time,” says Nixon. The Georgetown resident chuckles recalling Fossey’s demand for a year of his life: “I don’t know if it was a trick of hers, but it definitely changed my whole life trajectory.”   Ann Friedman Founder and CEO, Planet Word After a brief stint in investment banking, Ann Friedman became a teacher at age 45. When she retired from teaching reading at Bethesda’s Burning Tree Elementary School, she wanted to keep educating. “Here I am with all this expertise in literacy, and I felt like that was so important,” she says. “And everything was going the opposite direction—people were reading less.” In 2012, Friedman saw an article about the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, an interactive space aimed at engaging people with math-related exhibits. She pictured a similar museum in DC, with a focus on language arts, so she convened a team of experts to help her pull off the vision. As it happened, the District government was desperate to find a tenant for the Franklin School, a National Historic Landmark downtown. “I looked at this building that was really deteriorating and said, ‘No, not interested,’ ” Friedman recalls. The city urged her to reconsider. She learned that the school had been the receiving site of Alexander Graham Bell’s first photophone message and that The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett once lived just up the block. Suddenly, it seemed a fated home for a museum exploring the intersection of language and technology. Friedman funded the school’s $35 million restoration and rehabilitation, transforming it into a museum for the language arts. Planet Word opened in 2020 and has become a fixture of DC’s rich museum scene, arriving at a critical time: Literacy rates were already on the decline among American students and have dipped lower since the pandemic. Planet Word’s goal of inspiring a love of language manifests in an array of hands-on, tech-based exhibits. Visitors can make speeches, tell dad jokes, and sing karaoke. Librarians, poets, and other wordsmiths speak on all manner of topics related to language arts, sometimes moderated by journalists and authors, including her husband, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “I hope that something will grab [visitors’] interest that has to do with words and language,” Friedman says. While you’ll see plenty of kids traipsing through the halls, the museum is aimed at all readers. “There are people from every race, every background, every language—and they’re all here having fun and learning together. I love that, and that’s why I like living in Washington, too.” This article appears in the January 2026 issue of Washingtonian.The post Meet the Washingtonians of the Year first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less