By Lanita Whitehurst
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At IMPACT we believe small-business-creation boosts economic power. IMPACT’s Entrepreneur Jumpstart continued last Tuesday night with a session on how to choose your business legal structure and basic accounting and taxes. Guest presenters were lawyer and notary Carlos Iglesias (a former IMPACT staff member!) and tax professional Kelly Ventura of Empire Professional Services, LLC. Students […]
Community-based cooking classes can be a great way to bring people together through food while also potentially boosting their economic power. By teaching new skills and building networks of support, we help residents connect to others as they take steps to gain employment or start small businesses. IMPACT Network Builder Daniel Centeno (a culinary school graduate and certified […]
Written by Eric Moreno Shutting down voting locations in poor Black neighborhoods. Underservicing polls in Blue counties. Illegally purging thousands of voters from the state archives. These are just a few of the ways that Georgia’s 2018 race for governor was undermined by rampant voter suppression, as powerfully and concisely depicted in Brave New Films’ Suppressed and Sabotaged: The Fight […]
Frankie Blackburn shares how she's taken the network-building skills she honed in Silver Spring and applied them to grassroots organizing in rural North Carolina. In 1999, Frankie Blackburn, along with a small group of committed residents, founded IMPACT Silver Spring. Frankie left IMPACT in 2010 and became a partner in Trusted Space Partners, an organization supporting collaborative […]
On Saturday, April 23 residents gathered on the green space at Westchester West Apartments for IMPACT’s first Neighbor Exchange since the start of the pandemic. The event was organized by members of the Hewitt Avenue Neighbor Circle (HANC) and featured fun family activities, music, connections to county resources and services, and COVID testing and vaccinations. The HANC […]
It’s a sunny evening in early April and the soccer season has just kicked off for youth in the IMPACT Sports Program. Players on the U15 – U16 teams (meaning “under” ages 15 and 16) are here on the soccer field next to Weller Road Elementary School. Weaving in and out of rows of bright orange […]
Here’s a sneak peek at the nature classroom IMPACT is helping develop at JoAnn Leleck Elementary School in the Broad Acres neighborhood of Silver Spring. Kyree Clark, IMPACT’s Community Garden Network Builder is stewarding the project. Tucked away in a courtyard at the school, the nature classroom has raised beds, an area for mushroom cultivation, […]
written by Rudy Logan As a Network Builder at IMPACT Silver Spring, in collaboration with Young People for Progress it’s been my pleasure to facilitate bi-weekly, online discussions for a group of mostly BIPOC young adults. Since concluding the planning phase with YPP’s President, Danielle Blocker, the group has explored themes of abolition, defunding, restorative justice, […]
written by Soha Mustafa, IMPACT Intern On February 26, we celebrated the 20 graduates from the Sewing Academy's winter session, as these hardworking students showed off their fabulous work on the runway. Though some started barely able to thread a needle, the graduates progressed quickly, despite the challenges of COVID, through weekly classes held at Hughes United Methodist […]
At IMPACT, we know that Black history is American history and that the two cannot be separated. With that full knowledge, during this month dedicated to the discovery and remembrance of history for, by, and about Black Americans, we humbly invite you to join us for a journey we’re calling “History, Identity, Rootedness.”