DCFYI

DCFYI immediately welcomed Christie into its community when she moved to DC in fall 2017, and she has been volunteering with DCFYI ever since. Christie is a mentor to a creative, determined, thoughtful, and-the-list-goes-on young person, and she remains consistently inspired by the incredible staff, dedicated volunteers, and resilient young people who give the program its heart and life.

When I moved to DC, I began the valuable but often lengthy process of building a community in a new city.  Above all, I sought authenticity, intention, kinship, dedication, and passion, with the hope that I would find all of these things while contributing to a cause I cared about.  Rather than having to build this community on my own, however, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon DCFYI, an organization whose members—teens and adults alike—embody each of these characteristics and more.
 
I cannot overstate the value of this program or the respect I have for the teens and adults who contribute to it.  Each day, I am grateful for the opportunity to meet individuals who are at once resilient, compassionate, and willing to find a reason to laugh, and to be a mentor to a teen who teaches me something new every time we are together.  If nothing else, I leave each event humbled from having lost yet another game to a competitive teen and enlightened from having learned some new slang that the “kids these days” are using.  It’s been a brick (did I use that right?!) since I found this much joy in one place, and I am so glad to be a part of it.

Christie is a senior policy counsel for a non-profit government watchdog and joined the board in 2025.