Family and Community

Children grow up in, and their families live in, neighborhoods. The characteristics of those neighborhoods deeply affect all aspects of children’s lives — how they live, learn and play. Some DC neighborhoods have many assets that enrich children’s lives.

Others, however, are characterized by concentrated poverty, which creates (and continues) many challenges for children and families living in them, including poor performing schools, higher levels of violent crime and less access to healthy food, libraries and parks and recreation centers.

These neighborhood-based differences drive inequity in opportunity for our city’s children and are beyond the power of individual children and families to change. They are a product of and perpetuate a long and regrettable history of racial discrimination and segregation that was institutional and created and enforced over centuries by laws and practices whose effects we still feel today.