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Rotary eClub One Professional Excellence Award 2011

A highlight of the Rotary eClub One Annual Dinner in New Orleans was the announcement of the recipient of the club’s Professional Excellence Award for 2011. This award is given annually to a person outside the Rotary club who has demonstrated professional excellence in a not-for-profit organization.

This year’s recipient is Martha J. Kegel who received a framed certificate of excellence and a US$5,000 donation to her charity from Rotary eClub One President Carol Lightfoot Steen.

Martha J. Kegel is an attorney and Executive Director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans, an award-winning collaborative of 60 agencies providing housing and services to prevent, reduce and end homelessness in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. 

She is an adjunct professor at Loyola University School of Law and has taught disability law at Tulane University’s School of Social Work. She was the 2002 recipient of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Career Public Interest Award.

Ms. Kegel holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Drake University and a juris doctorate degree from Stanford Law School, where she was an editor of the Stanford Law Review. She clerked for the Hon. Henry A. Politz, the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Ms. Kegel is a past recipient of a Skadden Fellowship for legal assistance to the poor.

She formerly directed the Homeless Legal Advocacy Project at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services/New Orleans Legal Assistance, where she focused on disability, employment, and civil rights law.

She was Executive Director and Staff Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, and served as Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Ms. Kegel formerly was a reporter and editorial writer.

UNITY was founded in October 1991, and Martha joined the organization in May 2003.

On 29^th August 2003 Hurricane Katrina devastated this city.

Homelessness has nearly doubled in New Orleans since Katrina, despite only 80 percent of the general non-homeless population having returned.

As a result of Katrina’s destruction, New Orleans is now the most blighted city in America, with over 55,000 abandoned commercial and residential buildings.

Jefferson Parish has an additional 8,000 abandoned buildings.

Based on a series of random sample surveys, between 3,000 and 6,000 people are now living in New Orleans’ abandoned buildings

75 percent of the abandoned building dwellers are survivors of Hurricane Katrina, with most having been stably housed before the storm. The rest are primarily people who came to New Orleans searching for work in the recovery or people suffering from mental illness.

87 percent of New Orleans’ abandoned building dwellers are disabled, with 76 percent suffering mental illness and 58 percent a physical disability. This is a much higher incidence of disability than the homeless population as a whole.

42 percent of New Orleans’ abandoned building dwellers meet national research criteria for having medical conditions of such severity that they are likely to die within seven years if left homeless.

A disproportionate percentage, 11.3 percent, are over age 62, compared with only 3 percent of the rest of New Orleans’ homeless population.

In 2008 UNITY launched its Abandoned Buildings Outreach Team – the only such project in the United States, after a survey of residents of a large homeless camp in downtown New Orleans revealed that most had come there from an abandoned building and had been stably housed before Katrina.

A team of four outreach professionals works full-time entering abandoned residential and commercial buildings by day, searching them for signs of life, and returning after dark to meet the occupants and begin the arduous process of getting them medical treatment and decent and safe housing.

Since Katrina, UNITY has housed over 450 severely disabled residents from the Claiborne/Canal and Duncan Plaza encampments, a national and international precedent, in the fight to end homelessness. 

UNITY has worked to rebuild its member organizations housing, lead an initiative to develop 3000 new units of Permanent Supportive Housing as part of hurricane recovery, partnered with Common Ground Community to develop supportive housing for the chronically homeless, and developed www.unityhousinglink.org to assist New Orleanians in finding affordable housing despite widespread destruction of rental units.

For this work, the UNITY collaborative was selected as the 2010 recipient of the Nonprofit Achievement Award by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH).

Martha’s approach can be described as “realistic optimism”.

Her testimony before the Committee on Financial Services, United States House of Representatives Hearing on the “Federal Housing Response to Hurricane Katrina” in February 2007, underlined her realistic approach to the challenge of community recovery.

A passage from her testimony reads:

The housing situation for the poorest, most vulnerable people in New Orleans is bleak and, indeed, desperate. Yet we are optimistic as we look to the future, because we are absolutely committed to rebuilding New Orleans in a better, more inclusive way. We are dedicated to working with government and the private sector to ensure that New Orleans provides a home for all of its people, including the poorest and most vulnerable – those who are already home and those who yearn to come home.

Martha Kegel is a courageous and intelligent leader who has used her many skills in management and advocacy to help people in need.

Rotary eClub One is delighted that she is the recipient of our Professional Excellence Award for 2011.