Hettie Fleming and Anita Segreti

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For the past 26 years, Montgomery County, Maryland, has honored two older residents with the annual Neal Potter Path of Achievement Award for their lifelong commitment to volunteer work.

The awards, named after former County Executive Neal Potter, are co-sponsored by the Montgomery County Commission on Aging and the Beacon Newspapers.

This year, the county selected Hettie Fleming of Rockville and Anita Segreti of Bethesda. The two women will receive their awards at a public ceremony on Tuesday, June 24, at 6:30 p.m. at the Rosborough Theater at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Food, shelter and care

Hettie Fleming is a woman of action, just like her mother was.

Growing up in a large family in Norfolk, Virginia, Fleming watched her mother, who constantly helped others through the local civic league and her church.

“She’d always be looking out for members of her family if there was something they needed, and one of us [kids] would be the one who would bring something to a family in need,” Fleming remembered. “Our house was always open to everyone.”

Fleming worked in IT and telecommunications for 35 years, first in New York and later in Montgomery County. After she retired early from her director job at Verizon, Fleming began volunteering in earnest.

Fleming purchases food and supplies for a program she implemented to secure food, clothing and other necessities for shelters and food pantries. She and her husband, Kenneth, often volunteer together. (They’re deacon and deaconess at their church, Mount Calvary Baptist in Rockville, Maryland.)

She considers her volunteer work a ministry. “We work our ministry together, and volunteering and helping others has been [a] blessing for us,” she said.

She’s well known for personally delivering “Welcome Home” baskets of household and cleaning supplies to formerly unhoused people when they move into their new homes.

When Fleming brings a basket of food to a person in need, she usually gets a ride from her husband. Her friends, she said, “tease me that he’s my Uber driver. He has a large SUV, so we can pack his car, drop it off and then go on to the next house.”

Fleming serves as committee chair for people in crisis for the Montgomery County Maryland Section of the National Council of Negro Women. She also finds time to volunteer at Montgomery Hospice, Montgomery County Homeless Coalition, Interfaith Works, Community Reach, Stepping Stones, Helping Hands Shelter and support groups for those with sickle cell disease.

The Neal Potter Award isn’t her first, though Fleming emphasized that she doesn’t volunteer for recognition. Her church gave her a humanitarian award in 2020 for her 1,000 hours of volunteer work during the pandemic. She also received the 2021 Outstanding Volunteer of the Year award from the National Council of Negro Women’s Mid-Atlantic Region and a 2025 Volunteer Service Award from Interfaith Works.

If people want to volunteer but don’t know how to start, Fleming says there’s a lot of need out there.

“There are so many things you can do. It doesn’t always have to be face-to-face; you can make a phone call. Just think, what can I do to help others? To me, that’s what we’re called to do — to reach out to others,” Fleming said. “Everybody has a little extra time to do something.” —Margaret Foster

Serving from the heart, one meal at a time

Anita Segreti didn’t expect that her efforts to improve her children’s school lunches would spark a lifetime of transformative community service. Yet more than 50 years later, she is being honored with the Neal Potter Path of Achievement Award for decades of compassionate, hands-on leadership in Montgomery County.

Segreti’s volunteer story begins in 1971 at the Little Flower School in Bethesda, where she launched the Catholic school’s first hot lunch program. At the time, she was owner and chef at Maria Rosa Italian Restaurant in Bethesda. A priest at the school reached out to her for help with the program.

“He asked me to get it going because I had the culinary and business experience to do it,” she said.

She did more than get it going — she organized a rotating team of parents, coordinated with vendors and built a system that brought hot soup and pizza to students each week.

That experience led Segreti to reimagine what community meals could be through her work with the So Others Might Eat (SOME) program. Disturbed by the low-quality recipes initially proposed — she calls them “Hamburger Helper recipes” — Segreti challenged her church’s outreach group: “If you invited me to your house for dinner, would you serve me this? Because I certainly wouldn’t serve you that…Why do we have to feed them differently? Why can’t they eat the same kind of food we would serve to each other?”

Instead, she organized volunteers to prepare hearty, home-cooked meals for hundreds of people in need. With her restaurant connections and local support, SOME fed 300 people for two days every month, for 10 years, on just $500. They served meals on the last two days of the month because “the end of the month for people on public assistance is the toughest time,” Segreti said.

“You can do this if you just ask people. Everybody wants to help. They just need the opportunity,” she added.

Segreti’s service increased over time. In 2011, she co-founded Transformations of Montgomery County, a nonprofit that furnished apartments for young people aging out of foster care who “had nothing,” she says.

With donated furniture from A Wider Circle and coordination with the National Center for Children and Families, the organization created warm, personalized homes for youth facing adulthood without family support.

She’s also a longstanding force in the Catholic Business Network of Montgomery County, where she’s served in multiple leadership roles and helped raise over $1.3 million in scholarships.

Many of Montgomery County’s most meaningful programs have been improved by Segreti’s efficiency and empathy. She has had an enduring impact on the local community.

Still, Segreti approaches each project with determination and humility. “I didn’t do it alone,” she emphasized.

Generations of Montgomery County residents can attest: When Anita Segreti is involved, lives get better. —Ana Preger Hart