Organizers with ONE DC and their broader community celebrated the reopening of the new Black Workers and Wellness Center in Anacostia on Saturday. Located on Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. right across from the Anacostia metro station, the newly renovated center is the result of a five-year fundraising campaign by ONE DC to own a space outright and use it for the purpose of building community power around racial and economic justice.

Maurice Cook, the executive director of the youth-focused nonprofit Serve Your City, says it was fitting to celebrate the center’s reopening on Juneteenth — a holiday that celebrates the day in 1865 when enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas were informed that slavery was officially over.

“What a wonderful bridge to Jubilee and to Juneteenth 2021,” said Cook. “I feel our ancestors in our hearts, and I believe they would be extremely proud of us.”

Serve Your City will be among the first community organizations to begin operating out of the space later this summer.

The center originally opened its doors in 2018, but then closed down for about a year and a half of renovations. The newly reopened center will have an elevator, which will make the building more accessible to people with disabilities. The upstairs portion of the building will contain a library, and the lower level will serve as the center’s main space for events.

Shakeara Mingo, the Resource Organizer with ONE DC, helped to fundraise for the center and its renovations. She says it cost $1.2 million to acquire and renovate the space — all acquired through ONE DC’s grassroots fundraising campaign. The team is still raising funds so that they can sustain the space and its work and remain debt-free, but now that it’s close to fully opening, Mingo says she’s excited for the many events the space will hold — from political education to yoga classes.

“I hope we can turn out a lot of badass organizers with this space,” says Mingo.

The fact that ONE DC owns the building outright and does not have to be at the mercy of a landlord makes the center particularly exciting, said Cook.

“We need a spot where we can plant our seeds and grow and build,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen so much of Washington, D.C., taken away from Black people. And it’s so great … to fight against that and to build the things that we actually need. And so it’s such a blessing to own the building and to own the property so that we can dictate what comes next.”

JoJo Morinvil, the Black Workers and Wellness Center organizer for ONE DC, said one major focus of the space will be educating people about worker-owned co-ops and how to build them.

Put simply, Morinvil said, a co-op is when workers come together to fulfill a community need.

For example, she said, “if there’s a need for healthier food options, a group of people will come together, pool their money, get a loan from a non-extractive loan fund … and then work on creating a food co-op.”

“It’s basically people owning their work so they don’t have a boss; they all share it,” she added.

Morinvil said the coronavirus pandemic has only further highlighted the need for more fair and higher-paying jobs for Black D.C. residents — as many Black essential workers faced additional risks at work without additional compensation and still struggled to afford housing and bills in the city.

“Not only are they dealing with not being paid enough at work, dealing with being exploited at work, they also have to come back home and not have enough money to pay the bills and possibly face displacement,” says Morinvil. “That’s what a lot of folks are dealing with.”

Morinvil says the center will rent space to other organizations that work on racial and economic justice issues. And in addition to being a space focused on Black organizing, it will also focus on wellness for Black people living in the area.

“We’ve also been partnering with other wellness groups so we can prioritize nutrition and health and exercising here in Ward 8,” says Morinvil. In the future, Morinvil says, she would love to see affordable or even free access to therapy and nutritionists in the space, too.

At the opening event on Saturday, people enjoyed an ice cream truck, danced to go-go music from Ambition Band, and perused the offerings of local vendors selling items ranging from books on Black political thought to skincare products.

The ONE DC event was one of a host of Juneteenth events held in the District on Saturday. Though D.C. celebrates its own Emancipation Day every April 16 — the anniversary of the day in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act — Juneteenth has been given renewed national attention in recent years. It became a federal holiday this week, after a decades-long fight from Opal Lee and other Black Texans for the holiday to receive official recognition.

Morinvil welcomed the opportunity to honor the fight for Black liberation — but pointed out some of the irony of the day, too.

“It was made a federal holiday, but a lot of Black people are still working today,” she said. “That’s another thing that we need to analyze.”