Mother Nature keeps foiling our plans to give back during this shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history. So, since all of this snow is making it really tough for us to move forward with our litter cleanup at the C&O Canal, we're pausing this effort indefinitely and focusing on another major way people can help local communities during the shutdown.

We struggled with how to recreate this plastic-free challenge for 2019 and keep it fresh, fun, and interesting. Luckily for us (and unluckily for so many others), living in the epicenter of our nation’s political universe gave us an idea.

We conquered our plastic-free week and have discovered the areas where we feel we can make the biggest individual impact on our global plastic addiction.

We're officially halfway through our plastic-free week and here are our top 4 lessons learned so far.

In an effort to do a little more than our usual trash clean up, we're challenging ourselves to go seven days plastic-free!

How can we top 2017? We're not sure if it can, but that's the constant quest, isn't it? Improvement. Resolutions. How will we be better? How will we do better? We sat down to individually to reflect on how we want to improve ourselves over the next year.

We've been quiet on our blog for quite a while. While we're more active on Instagram in general, we've also slowed down a bit there, too. We hope this post helps to explain why.

It doesn't matter what kind of person you are or where you place in a race. It matters that you show up. And, maybe most importantly, it matters that we continue to foster an inclusive, encouraging community so that people can continue to show up and don't feel intimidated.

In a city like DC, where you're defined by the title on your business card, it can be tough to maintain, or even be aware of, an identity outside of your office. As a DC denizen, I often have competing identities, and thus have frequently competing priorities. Where's the sweet spot?