Get ready for an awesome addition to the neighborhood: author Dave Eggers’ 826, a non-profit that tutors kids on reading, writing, and publishing, will be opening a location in Columbia Heights soon. They’ll be in the old Score! location on the Civic Plaza. The City Paper says they’re aiming at a September move-in.
The non-profit, which also has locations in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere, always has an interesting storefront shop to subsidize the tutoring section: for example, the NYC branch’s storefront is called the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store, which sells funny gadgets, posters, capes and such.
In this case, 826DC‘s storefront will be the Museum of Unnatural History. They explain the concept as
a monument to the long-forgotten ‘Unnaturalist Society’—a group of bizarre, outcast scientists who believed that ‘the path to truth often leads through the absurd.
Sounds like a lot of fun, and also a great place to volunteer. My friend volunteers at the Brooklyn location and raves about it. They’re already having events (and sort of evolved from the Capitol Letters program, but more on that soon), so check them out, though it looks like they have lots of volunteers so far. The Post has an article and they’re on Twitter as well.
