Elizabeth Nelson & Nick Alberti · 2013 Honorees

Growing up surrounded by fields in rural Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Nelson paid summer visits to the town of Houtzdale where she found it “magical” to sit on her grandmother’s front porch and watch people walking by. She loved being able to go alone to the corner store or to see a movie and she vowed to herself that, someday, she would live in a city. Years later, when she and Nick Alberti decided to marry, Elizabeth agreed to move to the D.C. area where he worked and was living in the suburbs but she insisted that they live in Washington. When recommendations from friends brought them to look at Capitol Hill both immediately knew they were home. Since 1985 they have lived just north of Lincoln Park.

Though both had demanding careers — she with the I.R.S., he with the Census Bureau — Elizabeth and Nick quickly began spending considerable time on neighborhood activities. In their early days here they helped organize opposition to the nearby open air drug markets and poorly managed liquor stores that generated trash, loitering and crime; they became charter members of the North Lincoln Park Neighborhood Association, seeing it as a way for neighbors to share news of common interest, initially including crime statistics but now more focused on neighborhood activities. Elizabeth took on the writing and editing of the newsletter, “The Buzz,” which she puts out once a month and which is delivered to 2200 households. She and Nick started a local Cub Scout pack which they ran for six years. Today Nick is a volunteer with the pack at Maury Elementary School where Elizabeth has become an almost full time volunteer teaching the Junior Achievement Program in financial literacy, working in the garden, helping produce the yearbook, running an after school knitting club and being a constant, strong fundraiser and advocate. 

Nick Alberti grew up in Schenectady, New York where his father worked for the main employer in town, General Electric. A math major at college led him to a career as a statistician with the Census Bureau designing samples and surveys. You might say that ability to analyze data and an interest in local government led him to his service as Commissioner for ANC 6A, an unpaid position he won in 2002 when boundaries were redrawn. His role there, as he sees it, is to “facilitate people solving quality of life issues.” Often, for him, this involves understanding rules and regulations and communicating them to the people they affect. “Local government really can work,” he says, and that starts in the monthly meetings of the ANCs. Many of the issues that come to him have to do with the perennial tug between real estate development and the responsibility and desire to maintain the neighborhood’s historic look and feel. 

Elizabeth does not drive so her concern for public transportation and street safety is personal as well as general. Both she and Nick particularly value and want to preserve Capitol Hill as a place where neighbors will walk, seeing and greeting each other as they do.