Akiima Price's Story
Clean air in parks matters – even when you’re hungry.
Organizer Akiima Price knows the realities of connecting underserved communities of color to DC’s urban parks.
There’s a story they still tell in the dense urban neighborhoods around Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C., about a boy who died in a landfill that used to loom between the aquatic gardens and the shore of the Anacostia River. In 1968, while playing with friends in the landfill, the seven-year-old got caught in the open-air trash fires that used to burn here.
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From 1942 to 1970, black smoke billowed over homes and schools in the low-income communities of color that surrounded that landfill. The toxic clouds blew in through open windows.
Akiima Price was born near here. “As a child,” she remembers, “we moved from an apartment to a suburban townhouse where people were trying to move up and out of public housing. There was a dirt field behind our house, and we played in that dirt field and a sewer tunnel. We saw foam but didn’t know it was waste. We played and caught butterflies.”
Today the landfill is gone and Akiima is back, working as a contractor with the National Parks Foundation. She helps connect the surrounding communities with the beautifully revitalized aquatic gardens and Anacostia Park, both part of National Capital Parks-East. “Historically, there’s a disconnect between the people and the parks,” she explains. “These communities suffer from pretty jarring statistics around crime and poverty.”
Akiima has developed park-based programs that range from reconnecting ex-prisoners with their families to gospel choir performances to after-school and day camps for children. The camps provide environmental education, field trips and experiential learning. The agenda also includes something to eat. For some children, it may be their only food of the day. “They put nets in ponds and see what’s living there,” Akiima says. “Or they just come and have a meal and just be…”
But while the landfill’s drifting smoke plumes are a thing of the past, the air is still not clean. Six-lane highways choke off the parks and communities Akiima is bringing together. Overhead, jets take off from and descend toward Reagan National Airport. Freight trains rumble between rowhouses. Trucks downshift into industrial sites next to apartments and churches.
According to Akiima, when a child needs food and safety, concerns about air quality are secondary. “The clean air part is on the side,” she says. “The natural experience you have when you come into a green space, that’s the biggest thing. A lot of people lead stressed lives. A lot of it is getting out of your environment, the option of a safe space.”
But add a compromised environment on top of food insecurity and danger, and together they conspire to make children’s lives exponentially harder. Polluted air makes a park unsafe for a child with asthma, which occurs at higher rates among children living in poverty. “There have been times the kids with asthma can’t come to camp in the park because their parents won’t let them outside,” Akiima says. “We just don’t do certain things in the summer months because of the heat and air quality factor. On Code Red days we are not going to have camp.”
So, while it may be especially important for disadvantaged children and their families to get outside and experience nature, it isn’t always healthy for them to do so.
The history of polluting activities around the parks in this part of the city is typical — polluters cluster in communities without a voice. “Some people get hot and mad,” Akiima says. “But most assume that’s just the way it is. They’re so used to being disrespected.”
The solution, she believes, starts with building a diverse network of partners, including the parks, the people, environmental groups and social service organizations. She describes the process: “If we can take a family that’s working with a food program and connect them with a watershed group for a river trip, they come to see the park as their feel-good place. And they care about what happens to it.”
As constituencies for urban parks grow, they then advocate for clean air in those parks. And that empowers vulnerable communities to advocate for clean air for themselves.
