Social Conscience For the County

UCM was the first nonprofit to join the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce in the early 1980s, a move that Kelso said helped generate corporate donations. "We are a business supplying needed services to the community."

"Sharon accomplishes a lot," said Chuck Bean, executive director of the nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, a group formed by Kelso and other leaders three years ago to create a regional voice for human service needs. "There's the regional level, down to the neighborhoods of Route 1."

A recent victory still has her smiling: the supervisors' decision last year to follow the recommendations of the Homeless Oversight Committee (she was co-chairman) to build a fourth family shelter on county-owned land in western Fairfax.

"We almost passed out when they said yes," she recalled.

Kelso, who turned 65 in February, fell into her job at UCM. But in a sense she had been preparing for it since her twenties, when she landed her first teaching job in a community of migrant workers in Starke, Fla., south of Jacksonville. "A lot of them had family problems," she said. Then she moved to a rural school district in northwestern North Carolina, on the Tennessee line. Families moved in and out of poverty, depending on the tobacco crop.

In 1980, when her three daughters were in grade school and high school in Fairfax, one of Kelso's neighbors in the Kingstowne community told her that a local charity desperately needed a bookkeeper. Three years later, she was promoted to fundraiser. Within a year, she was appointed executive director.

Kelso has had a knack for identifying a need, then finding the resources to meet it. In her first year as director, she noticed that many families showing up at UCM's food pantry had health problems that were going untreated. "I talked to a doctor, and he said we needed to do what they do in the Third World -- open a clinic," she recalled. So they did -- in two back rooms at the charity's headquarters. Mount Vernon Hospital sent two old examining tables and rolls of toilet paper. Kelso recruited doctors and nurses for Saturday morning hours. The lines quickly grew so long that Tuesday and Thursday nights were added.

Soon it became clear that the families weren't getting dental care, either. Kelso organized a similar clinic, only to discover that the charity's insurance company had canceled its liability policy because it was offering health care to so many people. "We became too much of a risk." Eventually, the county paid for a needs survey and agreed to fund a low-cost dental clinic at another site. And the county still contracts with a number of subsidized health care clinics across Fairfax.

"Sharon wears her heart on her sleeve," said Supervisor Gerald W. Hyland (D-Mount Vernon), a former UCM president who served on the panel that hired Kelso as executive director in 1984. "But she has an uncanny scent for finding programs that are necessary and finding a way to make them available."

Hyland recalled another victory in the mid-1980s, when the county school system decided to close a child-care center it ran on Route 1. "Sharon said, 'UCM can do it. This community needs for us to take it over,' " he said. It was a major new commitment for the nonprofit group. Today, the Bryant Early Learning Center is thriving, serving 100 children a day, surviving largely on state and county subsidies and foundation grants.

Kelso and her husband, Jack, a former county planning commissioner, already have bought a house in Las Vegas to be closer to two of their daughters in Kansas City and Los Angeles. But it's been hard to focus on the move. One of her many projects for the next two months will be revamping operations at the Back Porch Thrift Shop, which UCM operates in the Mount Vernon Crossroads Shopping Center. She is trying, she said, to launch the organization into social entrepreneurship.

Given the pressures on county supervisors to cut the property tax rate, she is preparing the charity to rely more on outside revenue. The number of people the charity serves has increased steadily in recent years, reaching about 8,000 last year. County funding has stayed more or less the same instead of rising to meet the increasing need. State money, with the impasse in Richmond, is up in the air.

"The budget is not a pretty picture," Kelso said.