15-year-old Ivy City resident Mya Stuckey is going to celebrate tomorrow.

“Personally, I’m thinking about just getting like one of those little sheet cakes — nothing bigger than, like, a foot,” she says. “And getting some juice boxes for all my little friends around the neighborhood. And just celebrating, because we’re steps in the right direction. We’re not totally at the end, but we’re getting closer than we were before.”

Stuckey’s joy stems from the news Thursday morning that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s budget proposal for next year includes $20 million in funding over the next two fiscal years for a new community center and park at the long-shuttered Crummell School. The site, a former school that primarily taught Black students from Ivy City and Trinidad, has sat abandoned for decades as officials played tug-of-war over plans for its redevelopment.

Stuckey and other residents of Ivy City have been organizing along with the advocacy group Empower DC for years to demand that D.C. officials pay to convert the building and the area around it into a community center containing a basketball court, playgrounds, a job training center, and a library.

Bowser’s proposed budget, which the D.C. Council must approve before it goes into effect, earmarks $5 million for the project in fiscal year 2022. The remaining $15 million will come during fiscal year 2023.

For decades, children in the Ivy City neighborhood have struggled to find suitable places to play. Stuckey herself says she has been involved in advocacy around the community center since she was in the sixth grade; she’s now about to finish ninth grade. Young people in the neighborhood say the neighborhood’s “pocket park” hasn’t functioned as a space for them; it’s known as being a place for drug use and sometimes gun violence.

While the mayor and councilmembers have been in agreement about the need for a new park and more community space, the sticking point has been the question of how to fund it. While Bowser previously said she supported the development of a park on the school’s grounds, she has suggested that it should come as part of a mixed-use housing development. Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and groups like Empower DC have pushed back, arguing that the city should not wait for a private developer to fund necessary neighborhood amenities.

“You wouldn’t tell Chevy Chase, ‘You don’t get to have a community center unless it’s tied to private development,’” Empower DC Executive Director Parisa Norouzi told the Washington Post earlier this year. “In the age of racial equity, Ivy City still has to convince the city that it deserves basic amenities.”

In its recent amendments to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, the Council denied Bowser’s request to allow housing at the site. The site is not currently zoned to allow for housing construction, and McDuffie has said he won’t support efforts to relax zoning laws unless Bowser commits the $20 million for renovations.

So during Bowser’s Thursday conference with the Council, McDuffie applauded the move.

“The folks at Crummell will be really happy to see that this was funded,” he said. “They’re already calling me to see how we move it up.” (Bowser said on Thursday that she “would have liked” to have seen both new housing and the community center co-exist at the site. “The Council can still act so that we can have affordable housing there,” said Bowser. “I would have liked to see them happen together.”)

While advocates with Empower DC emphatically applauded Bowser’s move to fully fund the project, they said they’ll be pursuing more details — and they would have preferred to see all $20 million included in next fiscal year’s budget so that the project can be completed sooner.

“I can only imagine that having to wait for more money to come [in fiscal year 2023] slows the timeline,” Empower DC Executive Director Parisa Norouzi wrote in an email to DCist/WAMU.

Stuckey is cautiously optimistic as well. She doesn’t feel she’s “totally at the end” of the struggle to secure the community center and park, “but we’re getting closer than we were before.”

Given the proposed construction and funding timeline, it’s likely that Stuckey, who turns 16 later this year, could be close to her college years by the time the construction of the project is complete.

“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I might not be the target audience” for the community center and park, she said. But “as long as it … benefits the younger kids, that’s all that matters to me.”

And while Stuckey will continue to tune in to Council budget hearings to follow the Crummell School revitalization, she says this also won’t be the last advocacy issue she’s involved in. She’s interested in pursuing advocacy around educational inequities and public housing, for example.

“I’ve learned that when the younger kids or the youth of a community speak up for a lot of things, you get a lot more attention than adults speaking to each other,” said Stuckey. “You have to step up and be that voice.”