Team Leader Profile – Ken Mittelholtz

Public Service Is Deeply Ingrained in Ken Mittelholtz

Commitment to public service is deep-rooted in Ken Mittelholtz. The long-time Rebuilding Together team leader has put his altruism to work as a teacher, a two-time Peace Corps volunteer, and a federal employee for the U.S. Coast Guard and Environmental Protection Agency.

Ken credits much of his public spirit to his parents. His father worked in education and management roles for the Bureau of Indian Affairs while raising Ken and his brother in New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota. “My dad was by far the biggest one that influenced me in terms of helping others. And that probably got me also heavily involved in public service.”

After graduating from Bemidji State University in Minnesota in 1967 with a degree in chemistry, Ken taught science in high school for several years. He joined the Peace Corps in the early 1970s, teaching science in junior and secondary schools in the Republic of The Gambia, an English-speaking former British colony.

Ken then taught science in a private school in Maryland for four years before returning to The Gambia for another two years with the Peace Corps, this time working in the attorney general’s office on environmental legislation to protect wildlife.

It takes a village

The Peace Corps left a deep impression on Ken. “You learn more about them than they do about you. You’re enmeshed in the culture and you really do learn the issues that they’re facing,” he says. “Anybody who has come back from the Peace Corps gets involved with service stuff back here.”

Ken notes that “everybody wants to be part of a village [and] have people come and help you. But to be part of a village, you also need to be a villager. You need to do things.”

The Peace Corps was followed by an environmental job with the Coast Guard, issuing permits for bridges. In 1984 he moved to the EPA, doing environmental reviews of roads, airports, military and other federal construction projects until retiring in 2010.

When he worked for the government, people would often tell Ken he could earn more as a consultant. But he always felt that “it’s important for us to do these types of things. The public service has always been kind of important to me.”

In the 1980s Ken began volunteering with Annandale Christian Community for Action, a group of 21 churches in the Annandale area. ACCA sponsors a variety of food pantry, daycare, furniture donation, financial aid, transportation and other programs for Northern Virginia families, as well as partnering with Rebuilding Together.

Ken’s wife Camille and their two daughters are also longtime volunteers with ACCA. Both have served as presidents, and the couple was honored with the Volunteer Fairfax Community Champion award in 2013.

Helping people age in place

Unlike some Rebuilding Together team leaders with engineering and construction backgrounds, Ken’s do-it-yourself skills are mostly self-taught from working on his previous and current homes.

His first project was in 1994 when ACCA sponsored teams to repair two houses on National Rebuilding Day for the nonprofit, then called Christmas in April. He has continued every year since, stepping up his involvement when the organization began repairing homes year-round.

He lauds the nonprofit as ”a very neat program of helping people stay in their homes. As we get older now, it rings true a little bit more of trying to stay in your home for a longer period of time.”

Many elderly clients, he notes, are “house rich and money poor. They’re living on Social Security and don’t have enough money to do any of the maintenance” and are unable to do repairs themselves.

He cites installing grab bars in bathrooms and adding a second handrail to stairways as among the most useful improvements commonly made. He believes grab bars could eventually be required by building codes because “you don’t have to be old to slip in the tub and fall.”

Ken enjoys the camaraderie of working with other volunteers “as we all have this kind of commitment of helping people” to stay in and enjoy their homes.

He tells potential volunteers: “You’ll get a big benefit from it. I think you’ll feel good. It’s a neat feeling of helping people out.”

Links:

County Residents Ken and Camille Mittelholtz Named Community Champions

https://patch.com/virginia/annandale/an–county-residents-ken-and-camille-mittelholtz-nameb0521a1c1e

Annandale Christian Community Action Service Programs

https://accacares.org/service-programs

Volunteer Profiles are a continuing series celebrating the dedicated Rebuilding Together Team Leaders and volunteers, who come from all walks of life—engineering, construction, government, diplomacy, the military, and more.

The profiles are written by Leon Rubis, a retired journalist and editor who started volunteering with us in 2021. A long-time DIYer, Leon says, “I thought I knew a lot, but I’ve learned so much more from working alongside our experienced teams. Every project feels like an episode of This Old House.”

In addition to making repairs and modifications with us as part of the RT Express program, Leon is now using his writing skills to spotlight the amazing people who make our work possible.