Joining hands in a circle and singing a Diana Ross song about changing the world, 21 people graduated from the Braddock District College program Thursday, Nov. 17.
According to its attendees, the college, which lasted seven weeks, fostered a strong sense of community among the students, who came from Burke, Annandale, Springfield and Fairfax. For Burke resident and Braddock District College student Andrew Mills, the group of community members was almost a like family.
"Working professionals in this area often don't have time to make as many bonds with their neighbors as they'd like," he said. "Here, everyone was very helpful and very friendly … it was kind of a family atmosphere."
"Pressing the flesh, pounding the pavement, that's what gets results," said Tilly Blanding, regional community developer for the Department of Systems Management for Human Services. "The people in this particular group really connected." One of the purposes of the college is to get community members to connect with each other as well as with community leaders, she said, and the Braddock District students were contacting each other and talking to each other well before the class even started.
"I believe there is a sustainable factor with this group," said regional community developer Telli Whitfield, who helped organize the program along with Blanding. Many of the students stayed well after the graduation ceremony ended, he said, finding ways to get involved and stay in contact in the coming years.
THE PROGRAM was one of many neighborhood colleges across Fairfax County, but the first in the Braddock District. Students learned about facilities and services available in the district, how to file complaints and solve problems among community members and ways to volunteer in the area.
Whitfield and Blanding put together the curriculum by drawing upon the strengths and challenges of the Braddock District.
"We wanted to enable them with the skills and understanding of the systems to work with the community and to solve their own problems," said Whitfield. Among some of the topics discussed in the course were sessions on demographics, the revitalization of Annandale and emergency preparedness.
One of the Braddock District's biggest strengths is its ethnic diversity, said Blanding. "Hopefully, the college will reflect the community and how the community looks ethnically and culturally," she said. To obtain students and material for the program, Blanding reached out to different faith communities and to nonprofits across the district.
For Mills, who works in the information technology department of Fairfax County Public Schools, a class on the library system was particularly eye-opening.
"Since I work in the school system, it was interesting to see the relationship from another perspective," he said. Now that the course is over, he said, he wants to get more involved with Cluster VI parent-school groups.
"When you work with computers, you don't get the chance to work with the students as much," said Mills.
Anjana Desai, a former Falls Church resident who just moved to Burke after four years in Qatar, became inspired to go take the neighborhood college course after a parking problem on Twinbrook Run Drive, where she lives, sent her to the county to do something about it.
"I never thought that you could be on a board somewhere here and that your input could be used for community affairs," said Desai. "I realized when I came through this that they do care about what I say."
AS PART OF the class, students had been instructed to look at a community issue or organization and present it to the class. Desai's presentation focused on the parking problem outside her house and the way she dealt with it. People would park on the road directly in front of her driveway, she said, and eventually, she called the police and began looking into making the street a residential parking district.
"I thought, I have a Ph.D.," said Desai. "If I can’t do it, how can I expect someone else to do it?"
Other students described local organizations they were involved with, such as the David R. Pinn Center, county services like the Fairfax Area Disabilities Services Board and Adult Protective Services, or problems county residents face.
Dick Chobot, an Annandale resident who now works with the Osher Lifelong Learning Center at George Mason University, described the plight of the Fairfax County residents who are not poor enough to receive Medicaid benefits but too poor to pay health care premiums.
Chobot, who has undergone heart surgery and a kidney transplant, said he was shocked by stories he heard from visiting nurses about Fairfax County residents — many of them elderly — who were dying because they could not afford their medicine.
"These people have fallen through the cracks in the medical system," he said. "It is a real problem." But the course helped him learn more about the community and ways he could help people in that situation.
"We have lived in Fairfax County for 30 years, and I'll tell you, I learned more in these seven weeks than in those 30 years," said Chobot. "It makes you want to get involved."