Remember Veronica Maz helped start 3 D.C. social service agencies, dies at 89

"On a wintry day in 1970, Georgetown University professor Veronica Maz took two of her sociology students to Washington’s skid row to see poverty close up. They talked to a few of the homeless people who were roasting chicken claws over fire barrels.

'And then I was going back to my car and my real nice comfortable home,' Dr. Maz later wrote in The Washington Post. 'And a man fell down right in front of me, right on the sidewalk. And I just walked around him and got in my car.

And when I got in my car, I started talking to myself,' she continued. 'I said, ‘Why didn’t you help him?’ Well, I just assumed he was drunk. Well, what if he were drunk? He could’ve had a heart attack. . . . All that night I didn’t sleep. It bothered me personally. Whatever these sensitivities that you grow up with that you’re not even conscious of. That’s faith."

and another story ...

"When Dr. Maz first opened So Others Might Eat, she said the concept intimidated her. 'I knew nothing about soup kitchens,' she recalled. But she knew one thing — she would need soup spoons. She approached a woman in the apartment building across the street.

'I asked her for a spoon and if she would ask her neighbor for one,' she told The Post.

That afternoon, the woman brought over 75 soup spoons, and a movement was born."

Veronica Maz Obituary

Veronica Maz was involved in the creation of the organizations So Other Might Eat, House of Ruth and Martha’s Table in the District.

Very inspiring who knows what we will and can do?