Join Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) for their 4th annual fundraiser for Empower DC! This year's theme is: Learn from the Past, Fund the Future of Housing Justice in DC. The event features a screening of Barry Farm: Community, Land & Justice in Washington DC, co-directed by Empower DC Board President and DC Legacy Project steering committee member Sabiyha Prince. 

Empower DC has worked alongside Barry Farm residents since 2012. Join them to celebrate Barry Farm history and fund the ongoing movement for housing justice!

Reserve your free ticket through Eventbrite, and consider making a donation of $15 or more per ticket via a direct donation to Empower DC. Through this event, SURJ hopes to raise $20,000 to support Empower DC's work.

Please note: the True Reformer Building requires masks and proof of vaccination to enter the building.

From the film’s producers:

Take a left off of the Anacostia Freeway on to Firth Sterling Ave – what do you see? You see empty fields. You see shiny new buildings just breaking ground. Construction equipment. Sweeping views of the capital. As one community member states in this film, if you are a developer, you see a gold mine.

But these empty fields hold powerful memories. Enslaved people once worked this land. Later, during Reconstruction, the formerly enslaved purchased it, and built one of DC’s first thriving Black communities.

Here, the city constructed a sprawling public housing complex in the 1940s, beloved by insiders, if notorious to outsiders. Here, the movement for Welfare Rights took shape. Here, the Junkyard Band honed its chops on homemade instruments before putting a turbocharge into the city’s Go-Go music. Here, residents lived in the Barry Farms Dwellings up until 2019, when the last remaining community members were forced to move so the complex could be demolished and redeveloped.

Barry Farm: Community, Land and Justice in Washington DC was co-produced by The Bertelsmann Foundation and DC Legacy Project with the support of Empower DC. Funding was provided by Humanities DC and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.