Casa Myrna Vazquez was founded by grassroots activists and
street workers in Boston’s South End during the mid-1970’s.
Day after day, they found themselves listening with outrage and
frustration as neighborhood women confided of beatings and
abuse at the hands of their husbands or partners. Children
talked about the abuse of their mothers. As the campaign to help
them began to take form, activists from the Villa Victoria housing
development, United South End Settlements, the South End
Project Area Committee (SEPAC, a group chartered by the Boston City Council in 1968 to fulfill federal redevelopment mandates requiring citizen participation in urban renewal projects), Casa del Sol, St. Stephen’s Parish, the Church of the Covenant in the Back Bay and the South End Community Health Center joined to organize and seek support throughout the South End.

The agency’s founding coalition was a lively, passionate and diverse group, reflecting the vibrant patchwork of people living in the community. Latina women were a significant presence, one of whom was Myrna Vazquez, a renowned actress in her native Puerto Rico. Her vivacity and unwavering belief in the restorative power of the arts and culture was an ongoing source of inspiration to a community beset by many of the problems plaguing inner cities at that time, from crack cocaine and speculative redevelopment to violence in all its forms. When Myrna died suddenly in 1976, the group decided to name their first shelter – and the organization – in her honor. The first shelter, an eight bedroom brownstone in Boston’s South End, was staffed entirely by volunteers. It has remained in continuous operation since opening and is now Casa Myrna’s emergency shelter program.

Over the years, Casa Myrna added to its shelter capacity by acquiring other buildings in the city’s South End and Dorchester neighborhoods and converting them for use as shelters. Today, the agency is New England’s foremost provider of comprehensive services to abused women and their children, with emergency shelters and transitional living programs in the city of Boston. In the years since its founding, Casa Myrna has added a comprehensive range of shelter- and community-based services to help women and children recover from the trauma of domestic violence and begin to rebuild healthier, safer futures.