Candidate for Ward 1 City Council

Fellow Affinity Lab member Brian Weaver was recently featured on the Washington City Paper’s website with the debut of his new political commercial. The video features Weaver moving through some of Ward 1′s most notable locales, including restaurants, bars and a other landmarks. The film was directed by Olivia Abtahi, director of Dreaming Out Loud’s “When Dreams Emerge, Communities Arise!” commercial and a forthcoming documentary on the experience of our summer program Project Dream Green.

Weaver has a strong record of community-engagement and youth-advocacy through organizations such as Hoops Sagrado. Sum of Change – a blog dedicated to socially, politically and culturally conscious media – has included the Ward 1 contestant among its coverage of this year’s DC election season.

With the hotly contested Democratic Primaries slated for September 14th, this is a critical stretch-run for all of the candidates. Jeff Smith, Executive Director of DC Voice and incumbent Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham will vie for the seat which Graham has occupied since 1998.

With the increased attention brought by the ad debut on the Citypaper’s site -District’s premier source for all things fresh and new – the Weaver Campaign hopes the momentum can help springboard them to victory.

The Adams Morgan Living Blog

Recently someone transformed a community board at the corner of 18th and Columbia Roads NW in DC into the “Adams Morgan Living Blog.” With the health care debate raging throughout the summer and lurching through procedural votes and technicalities through the fall, the living blog allowed residents and passersby to leave their comments. The posts were made on small note pads stapled onto the board.

Living blog on the corner of 18th and Columbia

As with any anonymous public sounding board, the responses varied from the extreme to simple replies for basic equality, some of which were totally irrelevant to the health care debate. Here more images we took away from this snippet of our freedom of speech.

A broad view of some of the posts.