National Treasure | A Ballclub Finds Worthy Nonprofits in its Backyard
My brother, a D.C.-area resident and Washington Nationals season-ticket holder, has given new Nationals Park the thumbs-up, and as a lover of baseball and cool stadiums, I’m eagerly anticipating my first game there. In the meantime, I have to offer a hearty virtual chest-bump to the Nationals for following through on their commitment to give back to the downtrodden neighborhood in which their opulent palace was raised:
The Lerner family, owner of the Washington Nationals, promised to be a good neighbor when the team moved into the new $611 million stadium in Southeast Washington, an impoverished area of repair shops and strip joints cut off from the rest of the city by a freeway once considered the wrong side of the tracks.
So the funds raised from the Wall of Dreams and other sources will be used not only to build a kids’ baseball academy in Ward 7 and a new pediatric diabetes wing at Children’s National Medical Center, but also, Nationals officials announced yesterday, to support projects closer to home in a new neighborhood initiative: the Hopkins Branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs and the nonprofit Earth Conservation Corps, both just down the street from Nationals Park.
Of equal coolness: Two Nats players, outfielder Elijah Dukes and pitcher Joel Hanrahan, have ponied up five thousand bucks apiece for the effort.
Major League Baseball does a lot of nonprofit work, and the Nationals could easily have continued simply giving to their usual list of causes after moving into the new ballpark. The fact that they went out of their way to identify organizations in their new locale that need help is laudable. | 501(c)
Tags: Washington Nationals, Lerner family, Washington Nationals Dream Foundation
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POSTED IN: Charity, For-profit
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