From Service to Membership: A Celebration of Us Is Set to Open Its Doors

For years, A Celebration of Us has shown up for the community one night at a time. A gala here. A pitch competition there. A day spent feeding neighbors who had nowhere else to turn. Now the Washington based nonprofit is opening its doors to something more lasting. Membership. And founder Donovan will unveil it at Sugar Hill, an invite only milestone celebration set for August 27 at The Continent DC. https://posh.vip/e/sugar-hill-dc

The shift is simple to say and significant to build. For most of its life, the organization's impact lived inside single events, each one powerful and each one over when the lights came up. Membership changes that, turning a series of gatherings into a year round community that people can actually belong to, with programming, service, and connection that continues long after any one night ends.

To understand why the move matters, you have to know where this started. In 2019, Woodberry was carrying a hard season. He has been open about living with seasonal depression, and rather than let the holidays pull him under, he turned outward. He asked his followers to donate, promised to match whatever they gave, and raised enough for twenty fifty dollar Visa cards.

On Christmas Eve, he handed them out at Union Station. No board. No budget. Just a belief that the resources the community needs already live among us, and someone had to start putting them into one another's hands.

What grew from that night is a real body of work. The next winter came Posh Packages, gallon sized bags filled with socks, hygiene products, food, and gift cards, handed out with volunteers to help people through the cold. The Black Excellence Gala became a room where the unseen finally got their recognition, and it traveled from Washington to Atlanta to Houston. In March 2022, the vision was incorporated as an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

The programming only deepened from there. MelaninCon launched to put professional development, mentorship, and real resources into the hands of Black entrepreneurs, free of charge, so access is never the reason someone cannot build. The organization fed unhoused neighbors across Northeast DC alongside Feed the Mass, produced cultural experiences like Noir Nouveau and Velvet Vice, and moved real money to real people, eight thousand dollars in HBCU scholarships through HBCUverse, funded access for fifty students through Verizon, and seed funding for a Black tech founder at this summer's Champagne Reign.

Membership is the next chapter, and it is a deliberate one. Woodberry has framed the goal as expanding the philanthropy and deepening the impact, building a home the community can return to rather than a calendar of one off events. It is a bet that belonging, not just attendance, is what turns a moment into a movement.

That is what Sugar Hill is built to mark. The milestone celebration will bring people together to witness the launch and step into membership at the ground floor. For a nonprofit that began with one man, a stack of gift cards, and a train station on Christmas Eve, opening the doors to a lasting community is the clearest sign yet of how far the work has come, and how much further it intends to go.