About Us:

Our Executive Director,

And Our History

Sonia Crow

Sonia Crow, a seasoned communications consultant with a broad range of experience in nonprofit and grassroots organizations, accepted our invitation to become Executive Director of Palisades Village on January 1, 2009. She coordinates the activities and services that make it easier for older neighbors in the Palisades and Foxhall neighborhoods to live safe, comfortable, active lives, connected with the community and living in their own longtime homes.

The Georgetown resident, who describes herself as "mission oriented," gravitated for most of her career toward jobs that have made a difference in the lives of people around her or in the world, "whether that world is large, or small and community based."

As a consultant for the World Bank Group and the University of California, Sonia developed strategic plans and implemented them, as well as advanced fundraising campaigns and outreach efforts. She was lnvolved for more than fifteen years in two U.S. nonprofit associations focused respectively on foreign aid and private-sector development in the newly free Republic of Armenia. Crow, who has a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley, has held senior management positions at the Food and Nutrition Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and at the EPA.

Sonia's personal dedication to assisting the staying-in-place movement evolved on a personal, as well as a professional level. Her mother lived an independent and fulfilling life alone in her own home for more than forty years, but had to move in with a relative in the last decade of her life. As Sonia describes it, leaving her home - and especially her garden - was a devastating experience for her mother, and she is certain that had there een a Palisades Village in her mother's community, her mother's last years would have been far better for it.

A Brief History of Palisades Village

The eureka! moment for Palisades Village came when AARP published a piece about Beacon Hill Village in Boston, a pioneering effort to help people over fifty stay in their own homes as long as possible—an attractive alternative to continuing-care communities and nursing homes. A group of Palisades neighbors who thought that maybe we should create a similar village in our community held a meeting around a picnic table near the old trolley tracks on Sherier Place. Several who came didn’t know each other, and there were doubters in the group, but we stayed together.

The local AARP director and a photographer came to an early meeting, and a small story and picture were printed in the fall 2006 AARP Update. “AARP was the Village’s midwife,” as one of the Palisades pioneers observed recently.

By the end of a two-and-a-half hour meeting at the Palisades Library in April 2007, Palisades Village had become a genuine entity. The machinery for a tax-exempt nonprofit NGO was put into motion, bylaws were approved, officers elected, and a board designated. The organization would embrace Palisades and Foxhall, with an option to expand to neighboring communities later.

The Village’s existence was definitively underscored by a publicist’s dream—a front-page story in the New York Times, August 14, 2007. Palisades residents George and Anne Allen were featured in the story, which was a progress report on senior villages springing up around the country—part of a new trend for seniors.

The first half of 2008 was marked by a groundswell of activity around Village planning. Working committees were created, and Andy Mollison, a retired newspaperman, was elected president to succeed Mary Baluss, who had held the organization together despite her heavy schedule as executive director of a nonprofit initiative. An office became a reality with rent-free space at Sibley Hospital in a building scheduled for demolition. In addition to grass roots donations of more than $10,000 already collected, the Village received a $25,000 grant from the city facilitated by Council member Mary Cheh, a $5,000 grant from the Palisades Community Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, and $4,000 from the Coalition for Planned Environmental Development.

A brochure was quickly created, with pictures culled from the community. This Web site followed soon thereafter. A contingent from Palisades Village surprised skeptics by winning a prize at the annual Palisades Village Fourth of July Parade. Help has come from George Washington University’s local campus and Iona Senior Services and advice from established D.C. villages at the Watergate and on Capitol Hill.

In December 2009, we rented a new office, a 12-by-15-foot space within a third floor suite at 4400 MacArthur Boulevard NW. A year-end fundraising drive among resident of Foxhall and the Palisades helped us reach our goal of accumulating the equivalent of one year's expenses in advance. Defying the recession, and prepared to assist older neighbors who were threatened by it, we were ready to launch!

In January 2009, more than 150 members and well-wishers gathered on a Sunday afternoon in the Eccles Library, on the Mount Vernon Campus of The George Washington University to meet our newly hired Executive Director, Sonia Crow, and celebrate the inauguration of activities and services.

This year, on January 24, 2010, we will gather again to celebrate our first year, and announce plans for the next.

Download the Palisades Village brochure (PDF 326k).