by Quentin Wodon
For those who may not know it yet, the Barracks Row Festival is an annual family-oriented event for our Capitol Hill community. More than 100 organizations and vendors have stands each year. Depending on weather, up to 10,000 people pass through the street where the event is located. The event took place this past Saturday (September 24) from 11 AM to 5 PM.
For the second year in a row, the Rotary Club of Capitol Hill participated. This year our stand featured a bean bag game (as shown in the picture below where you can see that our game has the Rotary logo!) Children and adults who succeeded in throwing a bag in the hole got a cute slap bracelet. In practice, we (of course) gave the slap bracelet to all the children who wanted it. Thanks to one of our members and her colleagues, we also had face painting for children for a few hours. This was as expected an even better attraction for children than the bean bag game.
A few hundred people came by our stand, on a few occasions because they were interested in Rotary, but mostly because their children wanted to play or get their face painted. We did make a number of useful contacts for our club, but much more importantly we were happy to contribute to an important event for our community. If you or your organization did not participate in the Barracks Row Festival this year, please consider doing it next year. It’s really fun, fairly cheap for nonprofits to have a stand at the Festival, and a great event for the community.
Quentin Wodon is President of the Rotary Club of Capitol Hill which meets every second and fourth Tuesdays of the month at 7:30 AM at the Dubliner on F Street. To contact him, or to learn more about Rotary, please send him an email through the Contact Me page of his blog at www.rotarianeconomist.com.