Field Trips at HCC! Partnering with DC Collaborative

As a community space, Congressional Cemetery wears many hats. It’s an active burial ground, an occasional theater venue, an urban greenspace, and a place to walk your dog. But it also has a lesser-known identity as a non-traditional learning space: an outdoor museum of memory. HCC values education as a core part of its mission and aims to teach visitors about DC History, environmentalism, and mindfulness, among other important topics.    

Although HCC has long offered tours, beginning in 2024 K-12 school programs became available as well, starting with the free, middle school-aimed History Hunt. Building strong relationships with local schools became an immediate priority, particularly to establish the cemetery as a place of learning and a student resource. To do so, HCC partnered with DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative, a local non-profit that supports arts and humanities professionals and students by offering resources and connections so that program providers can supply educational experiences, and students can access new forms of out-of-classroom learning. DC Collaborative helps finance field trip transport, offers professional development, and creates a single point of contact between humanities institutions and teachers looking for learning opportunities.

With the help of DC Collaborative, HCC has served over 250 school-aged children since 2024, the number of classes visiting the cemetery increasing every season. Although a majority of these have been 5^th-8^th grade students engaged in the History Hunt, there have been elementary school classes visiting to learn about pollinators and going on tours and nature walks. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive as well, with one student sending over a drawing of a tombstone that says “Here lies my boredom because I wasn’t.”

So, a great big thank you from HCC to DC Collaborative for making this all possible and for further supporting our mission by granting us part of their Forward the A.R.T.S Fund, which allows us to fund transportation for more school groups. We appreciate all that DC Collaborative does for HCC as we continue to build our school programming.    

Are you passionate about education and want to support students visiting and learning from the cemetery? Please consider donating to our Children’s Field Trip fund so that HCC can continue offering completely free programs to schools and can further expand the learning opportunities we can provide. Please look forward to some exciting new programs coming up, as we begin the process of developing an elementary-aged environmental learning program, as well as a civics-minded high school-level program.