Posthumous Award

CITATION

It is both an honor and a privilege to posthumously present this next award in memory of one who truly represented the mission and values of VCU’s School of Social Work, Mrs. Olukemi Adamolekun, known to us as Kemi.  I first met Kemi in 1996 when she entered the School of Social work, from which she graduated four years later with a 4.0 grade point average.  But, Kemi was much more than an academically gifted student.  Her life was a reflection of the School’s guiding principle of promoting a more just society.

Kemi’s vision for her world was simple, yet profound.  She wanted a society in which people could live lives of dignity and respect.  One of the staunchest defenders of the rights of the elderly, as a student in our program, Kemi absorbed all the knowledge and skills she could for that day when she would return to her native Nigeria and bring into fruition her dream of a center that would provide home and community-based care for the elderly.  Kemi devoted considerable energy, time and passion during the last eight months of her life nurturing her project, Kaleyewa House: a not-for-profit- non-governmental organization (NGO).

Registered as an NGO in Nigeria in 2001, last year Kaleyewa House distributed food to elders in four centers, provided rent for those in need of rental accommodations, and provided medical examinations for elders.  It was cited by Hope, a local weekly newspaper in Ondo State, as: “…the first of its kind in the state to provide effective health care delivery for elderly [and] free distribution of food on a regular basis…” (Kaleyewa House Annual Report, 2003).

Kemi understood so well the critical needs of the elderly in a part of the world where in her words: “few provisions for support exist outside the family, and [where] the public sector is already overburdened with responsibilities.”  Although her life was tragically cut short in May 2002 when she was shot and killed in a car-jacking on the streets of Ibadan, Nigeria where she was on business for Kaleyewa House, in the time that she was with us wherever she found herself, she looked for ways to make people not only notice, but do something about the indignities and injustices that compromised the quality of their lives.