Markia Beckwith
Neighborhood: Oliver Community
“The Guardians has provided a platform for women like me that give a voice to the communities that we serve. It’s nice to get that recognition [to show] what we’re doing on a small scale, and then once we expand it’s like, hey this is what we’re doing in our city, this is what we’re doing for our state. There are a lot of people doing this work and they don’t get the recognition.”
Markia Beckwith founded Natural Born Champions (NBC) in 2012 when she was eighteen. Starting as a summer camp that still thrives a decade later, she’s evolved NBC to include year-round programming, with the mission to keep kids out of the school-to-prison pipeline, and to promote pathways full of college and career opportunities. Markia’s work has allowed kids get to participate in fun entrepreneurial pursuits and develop business ideas, provides before and after school programming, has virtual learning and tutoring services, tackles transportation issues, and provides parent and family workshops.
Markia’s latest expansion project is to renovate a multipurpose community center into a hub for extracurriculars, educational enrichment, and professional development. The center will include a computer lab, study hall, and health and wellness center, with plenty of cross curriculum options.
Markia likes to call herself the “Jeff Bezos” of educational enrichment program services, and states “I wanted to capture a space I wish I could visit as a kid before, during, and after school hours”. Markia aims to create a marketplace for all educational and professional development enrichment services for inner-city youth, educators, communities and schools in the greater Baltimore area.
