Housing advocate Morton focused on area low-income families

By Erin McGrath

Published: November 5, 2008

For almost 25 years, Margaret Morton has been helping families in Nelson County.

‘She is the first person we go to when the NCCDF are trying to assess the needs of the community.’

— Barbara Gibb,
Member of Nelson County Advocacy Committee

As a community resource specialst for the Monticello Area Community Action Agency, Morton has put countless low-income area residents in touch with the assistance they need to pay utility bills, their rent or mortgage, or just to put food on the table.

Now, at 74, Morton is getting ready to retire.

“It’s time to go,” she said. “I plan to do some traveling.”

When Morton first came to Nelson with the housing agency, she had more than 10 years experience in the field as an outreach worker but can still remember the first family she helped here.

“It was a family of three, a mother and her two children and they were going through some hard times,” Morton said. “I had seen this back in the other counties, so it wasn’t nothing that I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.”

In the first years Morton worked in Nelson, she said she helped families with needs like getting indoor plumbing to their homes.

“I came here in 1984 on the third of July. It was in the 80s and people still had to carry water and go outside to go to a bathroom,” Morton said.

Now, she has seen a great decrease in the amount of families without running water, but an increase in families who need help with food.

“Just the basics they need and they can’t afford it,” Morton said. “I go up to the food pantry and I refer them there as well. Sometimes we have money and I go purchase the food myself and I go take it out to the families.”

MACAA isn’t the only agency Morton works for, either.

She volunteers her time with the Nelson County Community Development Foundation, the Dental Task Force, the Nelson County Advisory Committee to the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and as a resident of Amherst county, sits on the Amherst County School Board, the Amherst County Social Services Board of Directors and the Amherst Housing Community Foundation Board.

“I can’t say no to things that I’m interested in,” Morton said. “I have compassion for families that don’t have. And a deep compassion for children.”

Affordable housing is something else that Morton said she has seen a real need for in Nelson. She said the need isn’t just in the county, however, but nationwide.

Working with families to obtain affordable housing is something Morton said she will continue, even after retirement.

“I like housing and I like to see the families when they’re faces light up,” she said.

George Krieger, director of the NCCDF, called Morton a “real warhorse.”

“The biggest thing about Margaret is that she brings a passion to her job but she is the personification of tough love,” Krieger said. “She’s seen all of the terrible problems before, she’s heard all of the excuses before. You can’t put anything over on Margaret, but shes there to work with you when you’re willing to help yourself.”

Barbara Gibb, of Nellysford, is part of the Nelson County Advocacy Committee and in a recent e-mail said the committee felt “that packed into this petit woman who is filled with kindness while practicing tough love, is a big heart and a very quick brain.”

“She is the first person we go to when the NCCDF are trying to assess the needs of the community,” Gibb said.

On Nov. 1, 85 of Morton’s co-workers and friends gathered at the Nelson Community Center in Lovingston for a dinner in her honor.