I’ve always wanted to be the kind of player who gives back to the community, so I’m getting ready to launch the Clinton Portis Foundation.

It was good to get away from football for a week but I’m glad to come back and get the second half of the season started. Hopefully we can do what it takes to get into the playoffs.

I think the bye came at a perfect time for us. The way our team has been banged up and losing people, we really needed that extra week of rest and the opportunity to get away from football. To be able to come back with a clean slate. Have a Sunday off, the chance to enjoy your family and enjoy a Sunday, then come back ready to play.

I’m not thinking about what I’ve done this season. Whatever I’ve done it hasn’t been enough to get us wins. We have 9 games left, so now I have to do what I can in those 9 games to help us win. Forget about what we’ve been through that’s put us in a 2-5 hole. Now we have to dig ourselves out, even though we have the tougher part of our schedule coming up.

The challenge is there, the opportunity is there, if we can find a way to win, it will be even better.

Everybody in the NFL has talent, what we need is the motivation. We have to look at the season one game at a time instead of the big picture. We’re missing guys, but we have to go out there and get it done with the guys we have and I have to help make that happen.

We go to Atlanta on Sunday. The Falcons have an awesome team and they’re playing at home. They had a tough game against the Saints on Monday night, but if you watched their defense you’d see a lot of guys who fly to the ball. The biggest issue will be John Abraham, he comes off the edge like a wildman. He’s sack happy. And their offense also gets respect, they’ve got a quarterback, running back, a receiver and a tight end, all Pro Bowl bound. It’s hard to stop that.

It’s been a tough season. We’re at week 7 and we’ve lost four productive offensive players. The line had already been shuffled and things were bad before we lost those guys. Now we have those voids to fill.

There’s a lot of aggravation, like you’re thinking why does the injury bug seem to hit us every year? It seems like the line has to be shuffled every year.

It’s aggravating, but at the same time I can’t let it stop me from doing my job or keep me from being productive.

I’ve always wanted to be the kind of player who gives back to the community, so I’m getting ready to launch the Clinton Portis Foundation.

It’s really not for just one cause, but I know I really want to get involved with inner-city youth. I also want to make sure to highlight anything positive going on. One of the keys is guidance. When a kid sits and watches TV, there’s nothing positive going on there. Everything is reality TV, everyone’s a rock star or an athlete. When I think about the shows I watched when I was a kid, there were a lot of positive shows geared toward family time, like “Family Matters,” “Martin,” “Living Single,” “Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper,” “The Jamie Foxx Show.” All showed families spending time together.

In 15-20 years these kids are going to be running the country. I don’t know if they have a dream, it’s not promoted enough. You really have to come from a good family to have someone put those aspirations in your head, to tell you to grow up and be a doctor, be a lawyer.

Even youth football. When I was a kid I used to play football in the street. Now, it’s all about being in a league and being in the right leagues. It’s all money oriented. You have kids training and working out. I didn’t work out. When I was 10 or 11 I just played football with kids who were 16 or 18 years old. I knew they were going to get me or they weren’t, so I did everything I could not to let them get me.

I hope to have an event for my Foundation on Halloween. Last year I took some inner-city youth to a haunted house. I’m big on Halloween, I like seeing people and seeing their reactions. I’d love to get something going by then.

I love D.C., I think this area gives you the opportunity to do anything. Also within a 5-hour drive you have Baltimore, Philly, AC, New York, Charlotte and Pittsburgh, plus all of the colleges. D.C. is so diverse, and there are so many young successful people. It’s great if you want to be around positive people and positive things.

As much as I love D.C. I want to play with the idea of bringing my Foundation events around to all different cities. Young people everywhere need to see positive examples.

I can’t really pinpoint what’s keeping us from scoring. We move the ball up and down the field, so we know it’s a Red Zone thing. We don’t capitalize when we get down to the goal line. It’s a mind-set and we just have to come out of it.

I can’t tell you even one thing that we should do differently. We’ve tried to run it in, we’ve tried to throw it in. Nothing seems to work for us down there.

We’re just trying to find any way to win right now.

I think the first time we come up short, everyone is like, here we go again. In these first three weeks I really haven’t seen guys play loose, having fun running around and getting pumped. Everybody’s uptight saying we gotta score, gotta score, gotta score.

The way you play football and the way you play winning football is having fun. That’s a given. And I think we need to go out and do that.

Against Tampa Bay you have to run hard, they have a defense that likes to run around and cause havoc. You have to run downhill against a team like that, you gotta bring it.

The big games, the division games, have not been a problem for us because we always come out and play hard. You never have to worry about that. It’s every other game, when we play the Rams, the Lions, teams we think we should beat, we get lackadaisical. We always end up beating teams that nobody gives us a chance to beat, and losing or playing close games with the teams we should blow out.

We just have to find a way to pull it all together and get a win on Sunday.