Geoff Bennett: Washington, D.C., native Akiima Price is executive director of the friends of Friends of Anacostia Park. That’s a program aimed at improving the park in Southeast Washington and the lives of community members.

Tonight, Price shares her Brief But Spectacular take on the power of nature.

Akiima Price, Executive Director, Friends of Anacostia Park: Nature is going to far outlive us.

(Laughter)

Akiima Price: I mean, that’s — sorry to say, but that’s the truth.

When I’m in Anacostia Park, I feel peace. I hear children laughing. I hear people on the basketball court. I smell cookouts. Anacostia Park is located along the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Anacostia is a different kind of park. It’s mainly like a recreational park. It’s flat. There are no monuments, but there is a skating pavilion.

There is a pool. There’s also a bike trail. Easily, a million people use Anacostia Park over the course of a year. The majority of those people that use that park are African Americans. And so the park gets a lot of use in a cultural context.

The Friends of Anacostia Park helps to support the National Park Service’s goals around keeping the park nice, keeping the park accessible. When I was tasked with building the friends group, I knew I didn’t want it to just be another organization raising funds, because we had a lot of social capital and a lot of human capital that we needed just as much as those dollars.

The premise, again, is on membership where you can have no money and just donate your time. So their human capital could look like the form of helping us clean up the park. But we also need grandmas to sit at the playground and watch over and make sure people are safe.

I would ultimately like to establish this park as a trauma-informed park that has models and systems that can be replicated and shared in other places, to where it’s really seen as a clinic, in terms of whether you’re using the space where we’re sort of just a circle or you’re having court-mandated mental health happen in the form of a hike, instead of being in a room, and call it therapy.

I know there are people who share with me that use that bike path that have gotten off their blood pressure medicine and their diabetes medicine. I have met people who are going through drug addiction that — trying to get clean, and just how just being in that park, the stillness and the silence of that park is helpful, and the fact that there are people that they can talk to.

Like, that’s what we’re about, is not just the park, but the people. That park feels like that’s my family. Like, the elders feel like my grandmas. And having our staff there and seeing all these people working and then bringing their kids, it feels like a village.

If you feel like you need the healing power of nature, just step outside your door. There’s birds in the sky. We just don’t look up.

My name is Akiima Price, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on the power of nature.