‘It’s just calm:’ How community organizers harness nature for youth healing in Ward 8

COLLEEN GRABLICK DCist/WAMU

At 11 years old, Glenn Washington probably knows more about the water quality in the D.C. region than most of its residents.

He’s collected trash from the Anacostia River, tested the health of the water in the Potomac River and, most recently, spent a morning gluing tiny numbered tags on freshwater mussels the size of this thumb — all in an effort to keep the region’s waterways healthy. Mussels are like nature’s water purifiers (one single mussel can filter 15 gallons of water in a day) but locally, their population has been threatened by pollution and stormwater runoff.

“The mussels can finish cleaning their water and do their part, while we do our part,” Glenn, with a temporary tattoo of a mussel stuck squarely in the middle of his forehead, told DCist/WAMU in Southeast D.C.’s Oxon Run Park on a rainy Saturday morning.

Glenn was one of a dozen kids at the park with the mentorship group Right Directions, tagging mussels for the Potomac Riverkeeper.

The 400-some mussels the kids successfully tagged are just a drop in the bucket (literally) for the Riverkeeper’s 50 Million Mussel project — an initiative to revive the region’s freshwater mussel population and consequently improve the quality of our local rivers. The mussels will be stored in a nursery until they’re ready to be placed in the Potomac River.

To the kids, the goal of the day was to learn about mussels — and successfully navigate a superglue tube without getting their fingers stuck together. But for Victor Battle, founder of Right Directions and a violence interrupter in Ward 8, the value of these activities can’t only be measured in liters of purified water.

“I think when we started today, we asked them if they knew what a muscle was, and they pointed to their arm,” Battle said, in between glances back at the mussel tagging station, where kids were huddled around tables. “So the education is a lot… when you talk to them, they can definitely tell you a lot that they’ve learned. It’s just exciting to see them doing something different, to get outside of the neighborhood.”

Most of the children Battle mentors live in Washington Highlands, about a 20-minute walk away from the park. With the help of an environmental justice grant, he founded Right Directions earlier this year, aiming to spark curiosity and entertain the kids while also teaching them about ways to preserve the natural environments in their own neighborhood.

As part of the mentorship program, Battle and his kids have already gone to the Georgetown Boathouse, where they earned certificates in water testing, and soon he’ll be taking them out on a fishing trip on the Anacostia River. Eventually the kids will be presenting what they’ve learned in the various activities to their families and community, and hopefully launching a recycling program in D.C. Public Housing, according to Battle.

But Battle — who has worked as violence interrupter since 2017 with Cure the Streets, a program run out of the D.C. Attorney General’s office — has other ambitions for the group as well. Alongside the nonprofit Friends of Oxon Run, Battle’s nature-based work is helping kids heal from exposures to violence and trauma, which he says serves as a gun-violence prevention measure and creates a sense of pride and responsibility in their neighborhood.

“The bigger thing is, in low-income communities a lot of violence is high, so a lot of the kids from the community get used to the violence and it becomes their norm,” Battle said. “Right Directions is working to try to change the norm…so this is also helping gun violence prevention. If they’re here, they can’t be in the communities committing a crime or being a victim of a crime.”

Battle’s group is just one of many violence reduction and intervention programs working in neighborhoods across D.C., including Washington Highlands. So far this year the city has seen a 9% increase in homicides from last year as it heads into summer — historically a time of year when violence increases. While some of the city’s violence interruption programs focus on employing trusted members of a community to intervene and prevent conflict, other violence intervention models use a therapy-based approach, reaching individuals who have been exposed to violence with behavioral health care.

Battle works closely with Brenda Richardson, a coordinator with the Anacostia Parks and Community Collaborative and the vice chair of Friends of Oxon Run, a nonprofit that supports the park. Since 2020, Richardson has been leading a series of outdoor learning events in Oxon Run, the city’s largest Districtowned park. She created the series to give kids and parents what she calls a “trauma break” from the physical, emotional and financial tolls of COVID, which fell hard on the city’s Black and lower-income residents.

“I think it’s important to be mindful that people who’ve experienced collective trauma and race fatigue are exhausted,” Richardson told DCist/WAMU. “You see things with wounded eyes and you listen with wounded ears.”

What started as a one-off event with about 20 kids, a falconer and a kestrel in November 2020 turned into a recurring monthly staple for Ward 8 families; Richardson hosted a bird watching hour, a music and math session, star-gazing and even a fashion show. One of the events literally involved hugging trees. Known as “forest bathing,” it’s the practice of using senses to connect with nature. Imagine feeling grass between your toes while walking barefoot, or wrapping your arms around a tree and pressing your chest against its trunk.

“This may sound crazy but it’s not, there’s energy coming through the tree to your spirit when you hold a tree, it reduces stress and anxiety,” Richardson said. “You have time to be in a space where you don’t have to be guarded, where you don’t have to be worried about your safety. Because we’re always in fight or flight and that’s just not good for our physical and emotional well-being.”

While events like mussel tagging do serve an educational purpose, Richardson says even just spending an hour outside can be healing, especially for children. Originally trained as a social worker, Richardson is partnering with Dr. Olga Osby, a social worker and academic, to publish a research paper about the benefits of nature-based, trauma-informed healing and its abilities to interrupt cycles of violence.

Osby, a Howard alumni who began her career as a social worker with families living in public housing in the District, is using Richardson’s programming in the park as case studies in her research, linking environmental justice, racism, and trauma.

“Getting kids out into nature is a way of helping them let down some of their guard… to connect with something larger than themselves as an escape from these oppressive environments, where there may be little to no green space at all,” Osby said.

The Trust for Public Land gives the city high scores in park access — 98% of District residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park — but a recent report from George Washington University’s Redstone Center about D.C.’s park system said the favorable marks rely on a false definition of “access.” While most residents may live within a short distance from a park on a map, in reality barriers like roads and highways cut residents off from the parks. (For example, Interstate 295 makes Anacostia Park inaccessible for nearby neighborhoods.) The city’s park system also has an equity issue, according to the report; outdoor spaces in predominantly Black neighborhoods like Wards 7 and 8 receive less maintenance and upkeep, and less community engagement compared to those in whiter, wealthier parts of the city.

In addition to Richardson’s trauma-focused work, as a coordinator with Anacostia Parks and Community Collaborative (and half of the two-person nonprofit Friends of Oxon Run) she’s also dedicated to gaining park equity in the city, and calling on councilmembers to invest more in parks east of the river. Earlier this year she testified at a D.C. Council gun violence roundtable, calling on Councilmember Brooke Pinto and her colleagues to incorporate park programming and trauma-focused activities into their gun violence reduction plan, and fund community organizations already doing this work.

“We have already discovered, based on our youth learning model, the benefits of the exposure to nature in the local parks,” Richardson testified. “It includes reducing stress and anxiety, strengthening community, sparking creativity.”

Existing research has already established that kids who suffer from adverse childhood experiences are able to successfully recover through nature-based play. Research has also identified that noise pollution, air pollution, and a lack of access to safe outdoor spaces can be linked to a higher likelihood of depression later in life.

But as Richardson told DCist/WAMU, one of the best parts of holding these events is that the kids don’t even know it’s happening while it’s happening. To them, they’re just playing outside, tagging a mussel, cleaning up litter. She says she measures the results — albeit not scientifically — by hearing their laughter and watching them run around outside.

“They don’t even get it, and that’s the beauty of it.”

On Saturday, that laughter and joy was there, even if a handful of kids did slowly migrate away from the picnic tables and tedious tagging task, and into the neighboring trees and amphitheater steps to chase each other or see how many steps they could clear in one jump. Despite constant reminders from Battle (“Why aren’t you tagging!”) sometimes they’re just going to be kids — which is also a part of the point.

“If one of them goes to a car and does something, it’ll be all over the news. But we don’t get a lot of publication of this right here,” Battle said, gesturing at the kids huddled around a table and a pile of shells, and others milling about the grass. “They’re doing something positive; these mussels may live longer than them. Their grandkids might benefit from this.”

And despite his age, Glenn Washington is thinking in the big picture too. His passion for aquatic life comes from a passion for swimming — and he hopes that one day, the waters in the rivers here will be clean enough to swim in. Until then, he says his local recreation center pool will have to do.

When he’s on land, he’ll be reveling in his favorite part of being outside: the quiet.

“The thing I like about nature is it’s calm. See? You can hear the birds. You can see the flowers. It’s just calm, nothing else.”

This story was originally published by DCist/WAMU