H Street Community Development Corporation, Washington D.C.

Outreach & Service

Summer Youth Initiative

H Street CDC annually provides a summer employment and educational enrichment program to selected D.C. teenagers who qualify. The Summer Youth Initiative is focused on students from disadvantaged neighborhoods who have maintained at least a “B” average during the current school year. Participants are chosen in a competitive process, based on applications, an essay, recommendations from school officials and community leaders, and personal interviews. We develop the program around a specific theme of study based on contemporary education enrichment needs.

We have adopted The China Challenge as the current theme to help prepare students to compete successfully for career opportunities in the 21st Century global economy. In 2006, we launched The China Challenge as an 8-week program of intensive instruction in the Mandarin Chinese language, taught by a certified Chinese teacher, and studies of Chinese culture, history, government, and economics, We continued the program with Saturday classes throughout the 2006-07 school term and took the students on a 17-day study tour of four Chinese cities – Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, and Hong Kong – in the summer of 2007.

Diversity Project

Whatever our heritage may be, we all want the same things in the end. We want to provide good homes and safe neighborhoods for our families, and a good education for our children. And we want to get along well with our neighbors.

This is the foundation of the H Street CDC’s Diversity Project, a long-term effort to promote understanding and harmony among community residents and merchants. Washington is a multicultural, multilingual city, with a growing number of residents and merchants of Latino and Asian-American descent.