Eastern Edition Person of the Year: Denise Smith Meacham, 'Ambassador of Love'

It can be hard to sum up who Denise Smith-Meacham is and what she does. There’s no formal title requiring capital letters to ascribe to her, no official organization that calls her president, founder or chair.

She prefers it that way.

Despite the lack of a fancy title — most people know her simply as “Niecy” — Smith-Meacham is well-known throughout Southampton. For more than 20 years, she has been consistently and tirelessly serving the community in ways big and small. And that’s why she’s being honored as The Southampton Press Eastern Edition’s Person of the Year for 2022.

When it comes to whom she helps, she does not discriminate: seniors, young children, families, Black, white, Native — anyone in Southampton and surrounding towns who has found themselves in need in one way or another has probably come into contact with Smith-Meacham, or been the beneficiary of her efforts.

And then there are those she enlists to help. There’s a name for what happens to people whom she pulls into her orbit.

“We call it ‘getting Niecy’d,” Zach Epley says with a laugh.

Epley, a graduate of Southampton High School, has known Smith-Meacham his entire life, growing up going to school with her children, Andrina Wekontash Smith and Trumaine Smith. He’s been a part of many community-based events and efforts spearheaded by Smith-Meacham, and said she has a particular talent for drawing people in.

“She’ll call and say, ‘Hey, can you come over? I need a little help moving some chairs.’ And then, five hours later, you’re making sandwiches at the church — and you’re, like, how did this happen?” Epley laughed. “And we say, ‘You got Niecy’d!”

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help” is a phrase people often will toss out reflexively, not necessarily disingenuously but often without any real expectation that the person they’re saying it to actually will take them up on the offer.

Smith-Meacham will — without hesitation.

Understanding that it takes a village to take care of a village, she pulls people into the fold, and once they’re there, they want to stay there, thanks in large part to her magnetic personality, and the way she makes the giving of time, energy, care and resources to others contagious.

“There are people I meet in life, and if they have a kind heart and say, ‘If you ever need anything …’ I say, ‘Hey, I want to do this,’” Smith-Meacham explained. “There’s still some great people in the world, believe it or not, as crazy as this world is.”

In effect, Smith-Meacham is a highly effective and consistent community organizer, the person so many others rely on to get things done and help people in need. Putting any other kind of name on what she does, or organizing it under some kind of official umbrella, doesn’t interest her.

“Once you start putting an organization together, and then you give people titles, people change,” she said. “Organizations tend to get more money, because they’re, like, ‘Oh, I’m a 501(3)(Z),’ or whatever, and I say, okay, you can continue to be that way. But when people get titles, they’re, like, oh I’m this and I’m that, and I did this and that.

“But at the end of your life, you’re going to die just like me, and you bleed just like me. So I don’t like titles.”

For more than 20 years, Smith-Meacham has been the organizer and point person for many outreach efforts, whether it’s putting together free holiday meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas at Kings Chapel Church of God on Hillcrest Avenue in Southampton, or at the United Methodist Church on Main Street in Southampton, or coordinating a time each week for unhoused residents in the community to come to the Methodist Church to shower and get cleaned up, or organizing food drives and cooking for people in need on the Shinnecock Territory or in other areas of the community.

The Reverend Joanne Utley has been the pastor at Hamptons United Methodist Church for the past two years, and has worked alongside Smith Meacham in hosting Thanksgiving dinners and other outreach efforts for Maureen’s Haven. She refers to Smith Meacham as “a force of nature.”

“She has a special gift for bringing seemingly disparate people together from all walks of life,” she said.

Whether it’s getting a local Scouts troop to show up and help out at Thanksgivng dinner, enlisting the Executive Editor of this newspaper, Joe Shaw, to chop collard greens, or convincing Zac Erdem, owner of Blu Mar, a Mediterranean restaurant in Southampton, to cook all the Thanksgiving turkeys at his restaurant, Smith Meacham uses her decades of connections in Southampton and her engaging spirit to bring all kinds of people together for a good cause.

For months during the pandemic, Smith-Meacham also was a delivery person, going out almost every day of the week in a van driven by her husband, Lewis, to deliver groceries and other household necessities to seniors and other housebound people in need in Southampton and Bridgehampton as well.

Pastor Ronald Wilson of Kings Chapel and his wife, Laquinta Wilson, have known Smith-Meacham for more than 20 years, and have watched her serve the community that entire time, admiring her consistency. Laquinta Wilson calls her “an ambassador of love.”

“Denise is an amazing woman,” she said. “Her boldness is so infectious and compelling, and her love for missions and those in our community who are overlooked and under-served is motivating. She is a tremendous gift to our church.”

While much of her community work is focused in the church, Maureen’s Haven is another cause particularly close to Smith-Meacham’s heart: She has been involved in helping the group for more than 15 years. She refers to Maureen’s Haven as “my baby” and said she always has been particularly adamant about making sure the homeless people whom the organization serves have a joyful Christmas.

“Jesus was homeless,” she said. “He was born in a stable. So Christmas is always important for me.”

Smith-Meacham demonstrates her deep love and commitment to the Southampton community that she has called home for her entire life in so many ways. Aside from caring for residents of all ages and backgrounds, Smith-Meacham also is committed to celebrating and preserving the rich and full history of the village, and to giving people, young and old, a full spectrum of culturally enriching experiences.

During her time as the president of the Parent Teacher Organization at Southampton High School nearly 20 years ago, Smith-Meacham would regularly arrange trips where she’d take several Southampton High School upperclassmen to what is now Met Life Stadium in New Jersey for the Whitney Young Classic, a big college football game between Smith-Meacham’s alma mater, Norfolk State University, and Hampton University, both historically Black colleges.

It was a cultural experience unlike anything most students in Southampton had witnessed, and she felt it was a particularly important and enriching experience for Black students who might want to get a taste of what it would be like to attend an HBCU after graduation.

She also would organize other trips and outings for students, and was deeply involved with the Southampton Youth Association for many years, working closely with the late Reverend Marvin Dozier, another pillar of the Southampton community.

In 2020, Smith-Meacham started a Juneteenth celebration in Southampton Village at Agawam Park. Juneteenth, which is now a national holiday celebrated on June 19, commemorates the official end of slavery in the country. Smith-Meacham was inspired to start the celebration after a vigil that was held at Agawam Park in the wake of the death of George Floyd, and it has become an annual event, with guest speakers, music, gospel performances and more, celebrating Black history and Black culture on a local level.

Doing everything Smith-Meacham does is not easy. It requires the kind of energy and commitment most people don’t have, and the fact that she has been at it for so long, and shows no signs of slowing down at age 62, says a lot.

Her daughter Andrina Smith, a writer, storyteller and activist who also is a member of the Shinnecock Nation, explained what has been the key to her mother’s success over the years.

“It’s her ability to foster community,” she said. “Wherever she goes, she has an innate ability to make the people she’s with feel like longtime friends. She pulls you into having a sense of responsibility to be part of a greater whole outside of yourself.”

Andrina Smith also spoke about her mother’s creation of the Juneteenth celebration at the park, and why it has become such an important part of everything she does.

“As we see the number of African American residents in Southampton plummet, I think it’s important to celebrate the history of what both Juneteenth meant and the presence of African American culture in Southampton, the presence of Black culture in Southampton,” she said. “As we see new waves of community members entering, it’s really important to be able to understand the full history of Southampton.

“For my mother, just being so connected to so many different segments of the community, she thought this was a really beautiful opportunity for Southampton to celebrate some of its really important members, so their presence and voices aren’t forgotten.”

Bryan Polite is the chairman of the Shinnecock Nation’s Council of Trustees, and he said he has a lot of respect and admiration for the work Smith-Meacham has done in the Shinnecock community.

Like Epley, he has known her since his childhood, and has witnessed the impact she’s had in the community for decades.

“She’s been a strong advocate for the Shinnecock Indian Nation,” he said. “She’s also been a strong community advocate for Southampton and the East End community. She really brings people together in that way. During the pandemic, she was a godsend to a lot of communities, doing food drives.”

Polite added that Smith-Meacham has been a mentor for many young women in the tribe when it comes to providing a model for how to do impactful community advocacy work.

“She’s been a really good sounding board for tribal members, and she’s just always running around helping people,” he said. “She speaks her mind, always, and will hold people accountable when she feels someone is not living up to what they should be doing. But she’s there for people in their time of need.”

Polite spoke to her personality as well. “Niecy is larger than life sometimes,” he said with a laugh. “She walks into a room — and there’s no way you didn’t know she walked into that room. She’s a great conversationalist.”

He added, “If you get on her wrong side, she will tell you about yourself — but that’s a strong trait to have. She doesn’t do it in a combative way.”

Indeed, it’s the way that Smith-Meacham does things that often leaves the most lasting impression on people.

Epley spoke about the deliveries Smith-Meacham and her husband made during the peak of the pandemic, and what he realized when he went with them to help.

“They were going out every Friday, making probably 200 stops,” he said. “It was a lot of seniors and older people who couldn’t leave the house. She had all the stops memorized and knew all the people who lived there.

“She’s just someone who really makes the heartbeat of Southampton go on.”