New Havener Of The Year

Honda Smith made a promise to herself and to her West Hills neighbors that, after retiring from three decades of working for the city, she would find a way to keep serving her neighborhood.

As a reborn westside community center thrives under her watch and neighbors keep busy and fed, that promise has been well kept.

Smith, 58, has spent nearly her entire adult life serving the people of New Haven in multiple capacities. As a public space enforcement officer for the city’s parks department. As a work zone and construction inspector for the public works department. As the alder for Ward 30’s West Rock/West Hills neighborhood. As the visionary who spearheaded the resurrection of The Shack by pulling together neighbors and allies from throughout town. 

She has long been respected by her peers and city residents more broadly for her persistence, charity, selflessness, and commitment to public service.

But 2022 felt different.

This year saw the second-term West Rock/West Hills alder work hand in hand with west side neighbors and local and state leaders to revive the neighborhood’s Valley Street community center, ​“The Shack.”

The 333 Valley St. community center has been a work in progress over the past two years. It opened this year and has begun serving hundreds of youth and seniors every month with educational programming, food assistance, neighborhood updates, and community gatherings. Along with other organizing efforts Smith spearheaded in West Hills, it has built a sense of community and caring in an often overlooked stretch of town.

Click here to donate to the community center.

“It lets people know that this is a community that’s alive,” Ward 30 Democratic Town Committee Co-Chair Iva Johnson said about what Smith’s work reviving the Shack on Valley Street has done for the neighborhood at large. 

Smith ​“doesn’t hesitate to do what it takes to implement vision,” Johnson said. She described her as invested, passionate, and a ​“good leader with the greater good of this community in mind.”

“She’s given her life to the community,” Johnson added.

“This didn’t come overnight,” Smith said during a recent interview on WNHH FM’s ​“The Tom Ficklin Show.” ​“This was a process that happened over the three years that I’ve been sitting on the Board of Alders.

“You have to be persistent. You have to listen. You have to be open to others and not think you have all the answers … You have to be teachable. And I just thank God that I am able to allow myself to be teachable by many. That’s how we became strong.”

"She's Like A Superhero"

A New Haven native, Smith was raised in the Hill and lived in Newhallville while attending Hillhouse High School. 

On May 25, 1997, she put down roots when she closed on her first home on Harper Avenue in the West Hills neighborhood with which she has become synonymous. She called that purchase the best birthday gift to herself. 

For 30 years and six months, Smith worked full time for New Haven city government. She served as a public space enforcement officer for the parks department and as a work zone and construction inspector for the public works department. At one point she was the city’s lone public space inspector.

Her roles with parks and public works prioritized keeping the streets free of trash and New Haveners safe. As a city employee, Smith established community relationships which later helped her to hear from her neighbors about what her home neighborhood needed. 

Smith left her print on New Haven by leading a citywide recycling and beautification effort and youth-centered service projects like the ​“Madvac Youth Program” and community clean ups.

For the past nine years, Smith has also been hosting a Winter Wonderland toy drive each Christmas holiday. (Click here and here to read previous Independent stories covering the Christmas event.) 

In March 2019, Smith retired from her three-decade-long public sector career. Later that year, she began her successful run for alder for West Rock/West Hills’ Ward 30, a job she saw as a way to bring resources and needed attention to a neglected part of town.

Retired New Haven Police Lt. Rebecca Sweeney-Goddard, who met Smith back in 1995 when she was in the police training academy, was one of many to answer the call to help Smith raise money for the Shack and organize activities there. 

The two worked together on food and book and backpack giveaways for years as Sweeney-Goodard advanced through the ranks of the police department. They’ve continued to work together after Sweeney-Goddard retired.

“She’s like a superhero,” Sweeney-Goddard said of Smith while helping out at a Shack-hosted event in December. ​“She never stops. This community center is the epitome of Honda — it can bring everyone from every community together. She’s like the mother of everyone.”

Keeping with the promise she made to her community three years ago, Smith ran for alder on a platform of seeking to restore her community’s faith in New Haven leaders. One of her main focuses has been on providing services to the youth and seniors in her community. 

She has also been a prominent anti-violence advocate in the city, and works to tackle issues directly in her neighborhood through partnerships with the Elm City Communities/Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) to get youth living in the neighborhood public housing working, doing alder walks in her neighborhood to check in with residents, and bringing city resources directly to the doors of her constituents.

"Success Is Liking Yourself, Liking What You Do"

During a tour of the Shack earlier this month, Smith showed off the recently finished Phase One renovations. Work officially began on the Shack in 2021. This year the Shack received a $550k grant from the state to support its renovations and programming plans. 

Smith highlighted that each of the center’s spaces is inspired by community ideas and requests, from programming for youth and seniors to indoor art.

The idea for the Shack came from dozens of community concerns Smith heard when door knocking during her first year as alder. Smith said she heard requests ​“from the young and the old” alike to bring back the Shack. 

Smith heard from her neighbors that West Hills needs GED courses, a music studio, senior space, tutoring, and a community meeting room. That input helped inspire her plans for the center’s design. 

At the Valley Street center’s entryway, Smith pointed out the front desk area where visitors sign in. That’s typically stocked with hand sanitizer and face masks. 

Neighborhood student artists returned recently to the center to paint the entrance with a Maya Angelou mural and the quote: ​“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it” on the doorway of the common area. 

To the right of the entrance is a designated storage room for a food pantry. Smith keeps that area stocked through community donations and her own team’s out-of-pocket spending. Pantry visitors are allowed to shop for the food products they prefer. Smith emphasized the importance of that freedom because ​“a lot of things you give people they don’t want. So they have the opportunity of getting what they want to eat, so we at least know it won’t go bad or to waste.”

The center is also equipped with a snack cart for its daily students and other visitors. Smith said she notices that most of the neighborhood youth who come regularly aren’t usually looking for snacks, but instead meals that they aren’t able to get at home. 

The many youth who visit the center daily were the ones that put in the work to clean up and rebuild the Shack, she said. That work included filling nearly 30 dumpsters full of the building’s trash at a clean up a year ago. 

Community members also volunteered their time painting the center and building out the center’s outdoor area with a community garden, fire pit, and cook out area for live music and entertainment. 

The Shack’s senior center, once it officially opens, will host programming for neighborhood seniors to congregate and do scheduled arts & crafts and exercise classes. The center also partners with the Community Action Agency of New Haven, which will offer energy assistance aid to residents. Smith also hopes to host intergenerational line dancing for youth and seniors together at the reborn community center.

The center’s entertainment room is where events like November’s Thanksgiving holiday feast was hosted to bring neighbors together with free food over the holidays. The room has also hosted spring events for families, and provides space for residents to hang out and play pool or foosball. 

Smith’s work during the height of the Covid pandemic included many hours spent cooking hot meals for hungry neighbors. With the center’s kitchen space, Smith said she plans to continue cooking meals for visitors. 

The designated tutoring and lecture room at the back of the center offers students homework help along with a separate computer lab. In the near future the center will bring in 12 retired New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) educators who will offer one-on-one academic help. 

The Shack’s interim executive director, Carol Kinder, spoke of how dedicated Smith is to helping young people. Kinder, who is a retired NHPS educator of 35 years, said she appreciates that Smith sought out veterans like herself to support youth programming for the center. 

The center is also equipped with a laundry room facility that will be used for life skill programs that will teach youth how to do laundry and make up their beds while also being able to do their laundry on site if needed. 

In 2023, Smith plans to make the center an educational hub for all to learn basic computer skills, robotics, and coding.

The Phase Two renovations that will happen after the start of the new year will focus on the center’s highly anticipated music recording studio. 

The center’s backyard has several garden beds growing collard greens, cabbage, kale, and herbs. The beds were handmade by neighborhood youth who visit the center daily. ​“During the summer they eat off the boundaries,” Smith said. 

The Shack has also served as a neighborhood hub to aid families with back-to-school supplies and provide space for neighborhood meetings to keep residents up to date on the latest in West Hills.

Shack youth ambassador Jordan Cunningham has helped to host these events.

Cunningham connected with Smith at the start of her journey restoring the community center. She invited him to be a community leader through the Shack and supported his high school endeavor of creating a community garden in the back yard of the Shack. 

“She does more than she should as an alder,” Cunningham said at the Shack’s November community Thanksgiving event. ​“She’s been taking care of me since in high school when I had a lot of things going on. She helped introduce me to opportunities and put me in a position to make change.” 

Cunningham described Smith as a mentor and second mother. He added that Smith’s work helps to shows people that ​“we’re an actual community.” 

"If I'm No Good To Me, I'm No Good To A Community"

Smith does also set an example by taking self-care breaks to avoid burnout. During these times she turns her phone, which is typically ringing every half hour, on ​“Do Not Disturb” mode. She takes time to meditate or spend time with her 36-year-old daughter and two grandsons.

“If I’m no good to me, I’m no good to a community,” she said. 

She gave a special thanks to her support system within the community that allows for her to have moments to recuperate. 

“If I didn’t have my team of support, I would be crashing totally,” she added. 

Board of Alders Majority Leader and Amity/Westville Alder Richard Furlow said Smith emobdies what an alder should be. ​“When she says she’ll do it, she does, and you don’t find too many people like that anymore,” Furlow said.

Shack volunteer Monica Clark said after having a major shoulder surgery Smith re-inspired her love for volunteer work. Clark now volunteers daily at the Shack. ​“This place gave me my life back” she said.

She said she is also proud of the connections she has built with her neighbors in her new role. 

“They had no hope in people. They had no hope in leadership,” she said. 

“At one point they thought I was a snitch,” she recalled of her neighbors. ​“They tried me, and they tried me very hard to see if I was a person of my word. But I was persistent and showed them. Now we cry together. We laugh together. We hang out on the corners together.”

Previous New Haveners of the Year:

• 2021: Giovanni Zinn
• 2020: Maritza Bond
• 2019: Anthony Duff
• 2018: Kim Harris & Amy Marx
• 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio
• 2016: Corey Menafee
• 2015: Jim Turcio
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur