WAMU | Voices of Wards 7 and 8: Providing a “safe haven” for youth in Southeast
Beverly Smith, founder of Momma’s Safe Haven, with some of the program’s youth participants. Credit: Dee Dwyer/WAMU
“When Beverly Smith was growing up in Southeast D.C., she says the house was always full of children. It wasn’t just her eight siblings.
“I can remember as a child waking up, and there’d be somebody’s child at the foot of my bed,” she recalls.
Her mother, Mary Grace Smith, took care of all of them. When Beverly Smith had friends over, her mother would make sure they had dinner too.
“She always fed the community,” Smith says. Her family was not wealthy; her mother was a single parent and they got housing through a Section 8 voucher. But somehow there was enough food for everyone. “It was almost like Jesus and the loaves of bread,” she says.
It was her late mother that inspired her nonprofit, Momma’s Safe Haven (the ‘Momma’ was almost ‘Mary’).”