Odessa Smith

Board Administrator and Co-Founder Odessa Smith has spent her entire career and most of her adult life working to benefit children. She has a background in early care and education with a degree in Early Childcare from Flo Valley Community College. Odessa has worked at Emmaus Homes and Marygrove Children Homes as a Community Support Specialist, and it was during this time that she realized that many, if not most, children going to residential and foster care didn’t have luggage. Many of them placed all their clothes in a trash bag. Odessa witnessed the fallout of children losing their clothes because staff mistakenly brought children's trash bags out to the dumpster thinking they were full of garbage. Odessa wants to make sure this doesn’t happen again, which is why she’s turning to the community for help through the My Life in a Bag Foundation.

Odessa’s community work has been on display through another initiative called King & Queen Enterprise LLC, which works with people within the community to hone in on entrepreneurial skills to help them launch their very own sustainable businesses.