Fatal Need for Jobs
When a young man was allegedly murdered by a Park Police officer who shot him multiple times in the back Monday, June 8th, and news cameras once again flooded the Trinidad, Northeast neighborhood of Washington, D.C., local ANC Ms. Lawson felt a sense of urgency to connect area young people with employment. “If he had a job, this probably wouldn’t have happened,” said Ms. Lawson to a group gathered outside of the Joseph H. Cole Fitness Center. She has been working in recent weeks with the Center’s staff and volunteers to create a jobs club. The Center, she hopes, will be a temporary site until she is able to open her own community resource, especially because the Center is slated for demolition.
The last time so much attention was focused on Trinidad, just one day earlier in 2008, the Metropolitan Police Department instituted checkpoints in the area, reportedly as a response to a spike in murders. All of the violence, Lawson believes, is a systemic issue, a symptom of an alternative economic structure that made 1980’s Northeast D.C. home to the District’s largest open air drug market, run by one of the nation’s top three most notorious cocaine dealers, Rayful Edmonds, III. This coupled with District public schools being the lowest performing in the nation and having a graduation rate of only 50 percent, and local environmental studies showing the neighborhood has on of the District’s lowest parks and trees coverage.
In 1994, Lawson co-founded Trinidad Concerned Citizens for Reform, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit organization, to help create a sustainable community first by literally picking up trash and evolving to landscaping and running out-of-school time educational and recreational programs that has enrolled more than 100 youths. Her goal: to change Trinidad “from a drug community to a garden community.” Her mantra: “A clean environment makes a clean mind.”
Though considerable work has been done to “green” Trinidad even before the word became stimulus package-mainstream, Lawson knows that to truly create a sustainable environment for the residents of this neighborhood – one of the District’s largest population of under 18-year-olds – jobs are needed. She sits on her porch daily and is asked by young men if she knows of any work.
“In order to continue to the family cycle and life cycle, we need to have jobs, and training and education,” Lawson said. “I see it everyday. This is what they’re approaching me about, they want jobs.”
Lawson mortgaged her home and purchased a liquor store to donate to the community on behalf of TCCR. This is where she imagines will be the site for the job training and placement center. Yet, in these economic times, it’s been difficult to raise funds to complete the needed renovations.
Grassroots community activities are being planned and an online campaign is being run on FaceBook.com, GoodSearch.com, and TCCR’s own website, www.TCCRinc.org to help secure the other funds needed. So far, approximately $100 has been raised, but it’s just a drop in the well of the project that has been projected to cost approximately $250,000.
“I get so excited when I think of the possibilities,” said Lawson. “All it’ll take is just delivering the resources and the support that’s needed.”
As investigation continues into the details of what transpired Monday night between Park Police and the young man, she hopes people realize the value of getting to the root of the problem.
“Education and training is the key. If you’re not planning for success in five years, where will you be?”