Steve Coleman (Executive Director, Washington Parks & People) has forged community park partnerships across the District of Columbia, and he is a leader in the growing national urban parks movement, assisting urban park partnerships across the country and beyond.
Beginning with the youth drive he co-founded 30 years ago to restore a forgotten stream valley park, Coleman has mobilized tens of thousands of people and raised millions of dollars to reclaim, restore, and revitalize community parks. In 1994, the President and Vice President of the United States honored Coleman and the late Josephine Butler for creating one of America’s top parks/ community partnerships – the dramatic transformation of Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park from Washington’s single most violent national park into one of its safest.
In 1999, he led the award-winning creation and reconstruction of the Josephine Butler Parks Center inside the former Embassy of Hungary – a permanent 40-room “greenhouse” for seeding community reclamation of the District of Columbia’s long forgotten community parklands. As Executive Director of Washington Parks & People, he leads the capital’s 16-year-old alliance of public/private parks partnerships, which manages restoration, stewardship, and programming of DC’s longest municipal park; forges park partnerships across the city; and owns and operates both the Parks Center and the Riverside Center east of the Anacostia River.
Coleman has served on the DC Environmental Planning Commission, as Parks and Conservation Chair of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, and as a member of the Advisory Committee on Greenway Planning for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. In 1998, Coleman served as Co-Chair of the District of Columbia Mayor’s Transition Committee on Parks and Recreation. His elected community posts in DC have included President of the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, Secretary of the Adams Morgan ANC, Vice Chair of the city-wide ANC Assembly, and Financial Secretary of Washington Innercity Self Help (WISH).
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