courtesy Marcus Carpenter
From left, servers Big Don McDaniel, Marcus Harvin, Greg Altieri, Adam Rawlings, Marcus Carpenter, Babatunde Akinjobi, and Bradley Woodworth.
One group brought a full-course dinner, complete with a choice of jerk chicken or fried chicken. Another brought a “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” DVD, a movie projector, and popcorn. Then a half-dozen smartly dressed servers showed up.
And just like that, with the inaugural “Dinner and a Movie” hosted by Best Video and the Newhallville nonprofit Fresh Starts, a dream, seven years in the making, saw its realization at Life Haven women’s shelter in Fair Haven.
Among the servers in the parking lot behind Life Haven, a 40-bed facility in Fair Haven that provides temporary shelter to homeless pregnant women and women with young children, were Marcus Harvin, Babatunde Akinjobi, and Big Don McDaniel.
The three were in the same unit at MacDougall-Walker Prison. In 2017, they started a daily conversation toward implementing a plan to “change the trajectory of not only our lives, but the lives of everyone we come in contact with after this,” said Harvin, a community activist and founder of Fresh Starts.
Best Video's Julie Smith.
Julie Smith, the executive director of Hamden’s Best Video, said the idea of pairing a movie with dinner arose in the midst of discussions with Harvin about screening the recently released documentary about his life.
“It’s totally part of our mission, it’s part of their mission, and we said ‘let’s do this,’” she said, as she and Administrative Director Rai Bruton made their way inside Life Haven’s 1940s-era brick structure to bag the popcorn. (Best Video’s popcorn machine was on the fritz.) “We’re here to bring the joy of film to everyone, including folks who are struggling a bit.”
As it happens, Life Haven is among the area shelters and warming centers that Harvin’s Fresh Starts team has been providing thrice-weekly meals since the city closed the brick-and-mortar Freshtaurant in February for lack of a food service license. The meals, numbering approximately 600 a week, come from excess dining hall food from area universities. Volunteers at Pitts Chapel then prepare them for delivery in the basement kitchen.
Life Haven’s Eugenia Coleman, a peer counselor who helps clients search for housing and employment, watched Harvin’s team bring trays of food inside. “I love this idea because a lot of our donors, they come in and they drop the food off and they’re gone,” she said. “These guys, coming in and staying to serve us, that means a lot.”
Life Haven's Yasmine Zayas.
Site coordinator Yasmine Zayas had a similar take. “[Our clients] come here, they’re sad, they’re angry, they feel defeated, they don’t want to be homeless, they feel like they’re just a number,” she said. “We try to make it homey, with decorations for holidays and game nights, but this is on a whole different level. This is special.”
To hear Harvin tell it — New Reach, Life Haven’s parent organization, prohibited press from the event to preserve the privacy of their clients — the affair went off with aplomb.
“You could see these tables full of families when we came over with serving trays and set the dish in front of them, how their posture just straightened up,” said Harvin, who asked his team to dress formally in starched white shirts and bow ties. “It was like you could see the dignity being infused.”
That’s part of Fresh Starts’ mission, he said, “to make people feel like people and not like charity, to make them feel that they’re getting a hand up, not a handout.”
Harvin described “little kids asking for seconds and adults too.” That meant a lot, he said, “because the meals we provide have to be delicious. They have to be what we ourselves eat.”
As for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” Harvin said Best Video projectionist John Arnold transformed Life Haven’s multi-purpose room into “a mini-movie theater,” with a theater-quality projection screen and Harman Kardon speakers.
“Kids were excited, tearing into their popcorn, eyes glued to the screen,” Harvin said. “You forget how the whole movie experience has been lost because movies have become this extreme luxury, in suburbia, and so expensive.”
Greg Altieri, Fresh Starts operations manager and emcee of the event, reported “high spirits all around.” The nonprofit’s aim, he said, “is trying to create ways to deliver services in a way that humanizes, personalizes, and dignifies the experience for recipients of that service, and this got that done.”
Harvin said there are plans for a monthly dinner and a movie at Life Haven and hopes to expand the concept to other shelters, space permitting.
“It was a beautiful thing,” he said. “And it’s just the beginning.”
Exterior of Life Haven women's shelter on Ferry Street.