Digital Capital Week is awesome. Why? Because among the great events, they brought together creative people to brainstorm how to keep Adams Morgan thriving while our neighborhood is hit with massive street-scape construction for the next two years. They are inviting people to think of ways to make the area boom through creativity.

I live in Adams Morgan and I have an office here. I love my neighborhood, and I am worried that the short term sidewalk construction will hurt our local businesses. The idea posed by the BID is to do something with innovative lighting, both to celebrate Adams Morgan is an evening destination location and that’s when the construction will be halted. What would you do?

Check out my little video about the construction plans and also hear from our community about creative ideas for lighting up the street to attract people during the construction. Have an idea to light up Adams Morgan?

Have an idea? Please comment here or get in touch with the Adams Morgan BID.

- Sarah

“Patients not profits, Medicare for all. Aetna profits, people die, Medicare for all,” were the chants heard in the lobby of the Midtown office of the Aetna health insurance company on Tuesday morning. Dozens filled the halls to demand that all life-saving procedures requested by doctors for patients be immediately approved by company bureaucrats. One activist held a sign, “Aetna is the real death panel.” Demonstrators with the Mobilization for Health Care now want an end insurance abuse and to win health care for all.

From The New York Time’s City Room blog:

The police said that 17 people were arrested after refusing to leave the lobby of an office building on Park Avenue where the insurance company Aetna has offices. They were charged with criminal trespass. In addition, the police said, three of those arrested were charged with obstructing governmental administration.

Organizers said it was the first step of a national campaign meant to publicize their views and challenge claims made by right-wing radio hosts and Republican officials.

“The myths about government death panels are pure hysteria,” an organizer, Mark Milano, said on Park Avenue. “The real death panels are people who are paid by insurance companies to deny health care to patients.”

Check out this great video about the action and join the campaign on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mobilization-for-Health-Care-for-All/134530106378?ref=mf&v=wall

- Sarah Massey

Metro TeenAIDS came by the Affinity Lab last Thursday to talk to us about AIDS in the District and the awesome work that they do.

Too many times, I have been overwhelmed by the statistics involved in DC’s Third World-scale HIV epidemic. Still, I think it’s worth repeating a few of them. DC has the highest HIV rate of any US state or territory. In fact, our rate is ten times the national average. If DC were a country in its own right, it would be ranked between Botswana and Uganda in terms of infections. One in every twenty people in the District has HIV. That’s 5 percent, and in certain neighborhoods the rate is as high as 7 percent.

There is also a tragically high rate of youth with HIV: one in a hundred. Metro TeenAIDS provides support through testing and after-school programs. Once a client is referred to them, they help guide the client through the emotional and medical landscape that faces them: informing sexual partners, finding a doctor, getting regular medication, whether to tell the family. Often the job is a lot of logistics work, like getting teens to their doctors appointments or finding emergency housing when families kick the kids out. Metro TeenAIDS also has a program in every 7th and 10th grade class in the District about STDs, dating, and setting sexual boundaries.

Molly Singer, deputy director, says that in a weird way it’s a highlight of her day to find a new client. Not that she wants anyone to have the disease, but so many teens have HIV and aren’t diagnosed; it’s a relief to know that, when MTA finds one of the thousands infected, at least that one will be getting treatment. Without treatment, HIV can become full-blown AIDS in the space of a year.

The statistic that astonished me the most was that Washington Hospital Center has only one social worker for 900 kids with HIV. One. HIV along with a whole host of other social problems: poverty, homelessness, abuse, lack of family structure… The notion that one person could effectively help even 10 kids with HIV, let alone 900, is absurd! As a former teacher, I worked 90-hour weeks to provide education and support to 80 students, and I wasn’t alone. There is no way that any significant level of service can reach even a fraction of these kids, no matter how good the social worker is. This is the reason we need organizations like Metro TeenAIDS.

- Janaki Spickard-Keeler

This past Monday, our beloved Affinity Lab was featured on the local news for the second time in two weeks.

As a “nurturing” “business incubator” with a business succes rate of 82%, Affinity Lab is sitting pretty in this time of economic worries. This comes as no surprise to most Lab members.

Joey Coleman, long time Affinity Lab member, summed up our collective small business philosophy when he said, “What’s a bigger risk? Yourself, when you know what you’re going to do and what your choices are, or putting all of your eggs in the basket of a corporation that tomorrow may decide ‘You know what? We need to downsize and you’re no longer on the team’.”

President Obama recently released his plan for small business and there are many provisions to help out budding entrepreneurs, including $250 million for public-private business incubators (like Affinity Lab).

So if you’re one of many having trouble finding work, consider taking matters into your own hands. In the words of Massey Media owner and principal Sarah Massey, “When you have a dream, it’s worth going for it.”

- Lyle Harrod

This past Friday Massey Media opened up its workspace to our local Fox news crew. We work in a unique and fabulous place called Affinity Lab, which is a self-described entrepreneurial dream and action space. It’s a space where web development firms, PR firms, small nonprofits, graphic designers, writers, performers, thinkers, and anyone with an entrepreneurial vibe can come to work and collaborate – a new type of incubator space with a notably higher success rate than other incubators. A green workplace, Affinity Lab is a community unto itself, with a high-tech, progressive, earth-friendly culture all its own.

Thanks to Massey Media, Affinity Lab was featured on the local Fox 5 six o’clock news.

We had had a few conversations with the reporter on Wednesday and Thursday. We expected him to be visiting us on Friday afternoon. Then we got a call from the reporter early on Friday morning to let us know that he was on the way to our workplace. He was interested in our story about Affinity Lab being a place for job creation.

We had had an office happy hour the night before. Rather than looking the part of a news-making, trend-setting venue for people who dream big, at the moment we hung up the phone with the reporter, Affinity Lab was home to a half-dozen bleary-eyed souls tapping lazily on their computers. In thirty minutes’ time, we had alerted the managers of Affinity Lab, tidied the place up, got our “stage faces” ready, scrambled about 15 more Lab members, circulated the press materials, and convened all available Lab members for a pow wow to give a lightning “how to speak to the press” training session. When those big cameras came rolling through the door, we were ready!

The final result speaks for itself. We got a choice press hit that places Affinity Lab as a new and forward-thinking space to grow entrepreneurial successes.

Some of the client-members at Affinity Lab believe operating in shared workspace actually has helped their success by sparking ideas and referrals.

Public relations firm owner Sarah Massey explains, “I started as a one-woman shop in 2005, right at the end of 2005. And, in 2009, we’re now a four person operation.”