Melissa Ashabranner · 2014 Honoree

Melissa Ashabranner spent her childhood and early teens in exotic places —Ethiopia, Libya, Nigeria and India. Going to school next door to Haile Selassie’s palace she could hear his lions roar in the garden. She remembers going with her professor father into the Ethiopian countryside to collect folk tales, caring for a monkey and a goat as pets, and having to stay inside her house for days because of political unrest in Nigeria. Returning to the U.S. for her senior year at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda she was surprised that her new classmates weren’t closely following the war between Pakistan and India as she was. Later, with an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology from Temple University and an MBA from Yale, she assumed she would go into some kind of international work.

But a job with a consulting firm working with non-profits brought her to Washington, DC where she met an interesting friend of a former roommate. He was publishing a monthly neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill using volunteer writers and his house as an office. Melissa decided to put her new MBA to use to help Jean-Keith Fagon turn the paper into a viable business. For almost four decades, the paper has served as the newspaper of record, as well as a main means of communication across the community in the pre-internet era. Today, the Hill Rag is a cherished neighborhood institution with distinctive artistic covers and 15,000 copies distributed each month. Jean-Keith and Melissa also publish two other papers, MidCity DC and East of the River as well as the annual Fagon Community Guide which provides a wealth of information about life in the neighborhood and pages of photos that have made it into a sort of community year book. Jean-Keith is the publisher, Melissa is the executive editor and, in addition to parenting all these publications, they have three adult children, Damian, Giancarlo and Olivia, and a grandson, Neo.

The paper has had its ups and downs over the years. Melissa describes the decision in the late 1980s to turn it from a monthly into a weekly publication as a “disaster” and the appearance of a good rival paper a few years later as a “wake-up call.” There were distribution problems and the constant challenge of new technologies. She remembers many times at the office with the children in sleeping bags under the design tables while she and Jean-Keith worked late into the night finalizing the copy and handing it off to a courier, then took turns napping while one of them got the kids to school and the other went to open the office. 

In 1989 Melissa became one of the founding members of the foundation created by the Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals to make small grants to neighborhood endeavors. She is now one of the pillars of what has become the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, bringing a wealth of knowledge of the neighborhood to decisions about grant requests and ensuring thorough press coverage of foundation events. Melissa has also served on the boards of The Hill Preschool (back when it was Wee Care), and the Capitol Hill Group Ministry. 

Stepping back from daily involvement with the paper is on the horizon. Melissa has a good role model for active retirement in her father, now 93, a prolific writer with whom she has co-authored two books for young adults.