In the heart of Ward 8 in Southeast Washington, D.C., is a 25,000-square-foot building containing two basketball courts, multiple classrooms, and meeting spaces known as the Mary Virginia Merrick Center. The center, which offers education and mentoring to the area’s youth, touts that it “provides a safe and welcoming space…where youth and families consistently gather to enrich their mind, body, and spirit.” 

Cardinal Wilton Gregory toured the center located next to St.  Thomas More Church and its Catholic school recently, where he met staff and volunteers, students in their after-school programs, and Darren Foster, the president and CEO of the Victory Youth Center, which operates the Merrick Center.

“Today, I wanted to let the cardinal know that we are serving this neighborhood,” Foster said.

Foster has worked for The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington for 24 years, starting as a youth minister in the Office of Youth Ministry.

The archdiocese’s Mary Virginia Merrick Center has filled a need in its community by offering out-of-school programs since it opened in 2007.

The center is named after Mary Virginia Merrick. Born in 1866, she was a native of Washington, D.C. Despite becoming paralyzed from a fall as a teenager, she dedicated her life to helping low-income children and founded the National Christ Child Society. In 2003, she was declared a “Servant of God,” and her cause for beatification and canonization was officially initiated in 2011.

Programs offered at the center include the Young Men of Valor and Excellence, which pairs at-risk youth with adult mentors; Girls on the Rise, which empowers young women during the school year and in the summer to discover their dreams and skills; and Community Nights, where local families can engage in sports, board games, arts and crafts, or watch movies.

The center also provides basic needs, such as regular meals.

“We are providing meals to families every day. Every youth that participates in a program here can get dinner before he or she goes home, and upon arrival, they get a snack,” Foster said. “You would think maybe not, that the kids wouldn’t want to eat it and didn’t want to, but food is very important for these families.”

Capital Area Food Bank provides the food, and staff and volunteers prepare and distribute the meals.

“Victory Youth Center was just doing building operations, making sure the building was working for the tenants that were here. But I saw lots of holes where we could also serve, so Victory Youth Center started to provide services. Since then, I have created an athletics program. I’ve created the boys mentoring program, Young Men of Valor,” Foster said.

He started working at the center about seven years ago.

“I wanted the cardinal to know this is an outreach of the Catholic Church, what we’re doing here. Crime is extremely high, high school graduations are low, lots of violence here. But we’re pretty hands-off. The community knows what we’re doing here; they leave us alone. We have very little incidents or issues,” Foster said.

According to Foster, 180 students attend the center daily for individual therapy, wellness programs, athletics programs, youth groups, and other activities.

“When this [position] came open, this was the opportunity to put all the things that I’ve done, my retreats, my athletics, under one roof and serve a community,” Foster said. “I think that’s what we’re doing. We give them a safe space, especially the boys.”

He explained that the ratio of students they care for is split in half between children from the neighborhood and those next door at St. Thomas More Catholic Academy.

“If you have some character, some value system, giving them a value system has always been the work that I’ve always done everywhere I’ve gone: character development and self-esteem and values. If you can walk in the street, you’re going to be approached, or you may encounter things that make you have to make a decision,” he said.

A Merrick Center program that is still in the early production stages is their podcast called “The Kickback.” They rehearse in the media center, which includes a complete recording studio.

“The Kickback” will be a 30 to 40-minute conversation facilitated by a social worker, and two groups of teenagers will come in weekly to rehearse different topics, such as music, fashion, sports, and lifestyle.

“Lifestyle covers everything under the sun the kids are going through: safety in the community, relationships, anything they want to come up with and talk about. How to handle poor relationships with parents, what’s going on at school, so lifestyle covers everything,” Foster said.

Foster said the show will help the community better understand what is going on with their children and provide students with production experience.

Although students attend after-school programs with different focuses, Foster hopes they all leave with “high self-esteem and character.”