At Social Work Day on the Hill, UTC student Kelli Webber spoke to the audience after receiving the BSW Student of the Year award from Dr. Keith Ekhator. Photos courtesy of Dr. Bethany Womack.
One week after being recognized as statewide Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) Student of the Year, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga senior Kelli Webber still couldn’t believe she was the award recipient.
“It’s amazing. I’m still speechless. I can’t believe it,” Webber said, her eyes tearing with excitement. “And if you knew me eight years ago, you wouldn’t believe it, either.
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
On March 20, the Tennessee chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) held its 2024 Social Work Day on the Hill event in Nashville, an annual statewide event that coincides with Social Work Month. It is the primary event for social work students in Tennessee, with students from 16 universities participating in the day’s activities.
As part of the program, in front of approximately 450 people, Webber received the BSW Student of the Year award from NASW-TN’s president-elect, Dr. Keith Ekhator.
Eight years ago, she couldn’t have seen that honor coming.
Kelli Webber
“I actually am a person in recovery. I have eight years of sobriety now,” Webber said. “I’m totally comfortable talking about it.”
Her addiction, she said, was bad. “I went down that long road and down that path.”
Her life turned around after she entered recovery in 2016.
“Pretty soon after I went into recovery, I decided that I really liked helping women, so I started at The Launch Pad”—a safe space for women in recovery.
She was The Launch Pad’s first employee, serving as director of housing. The organization bills itself as a home for new beginnings and “a place of sober living to launch women into recovery.”
The Launch Pad now houses 49 residents in five fully occupied homes.
“My work there really interested me in case management and how I could help them reintegrate into society,” she continued. “That’s where I got interested in social work.”
After three years of sobriety, Webber returned to college—which she had first tried after graduating from Hixson High School in 1989.
“I went back to school in 2019”—first at Chattanooga State Community College, then at UTC—“and as a person in recovery, I just wanted to help women in my community get the same advantage that I got,” she said. “I ended up here in this lovely school I love so much. I’m graduating with a BSW on May 4 and going straight into the master’s program here.”
UTC Associate Professor of Social Work Bethany Womack called the Student of the Year award “a particularly impressive honor.”
“It’s wonderful to see people work their way through a change process and be able to guide others through it,” Womack said. “She’s keeping people in recovery in housing and she is growing a program that will have a huge impact on the Chattanooga community.”
Webber, now a certified peer recovery specialist, laughed when asked what she wants to be when she grows up.
“I’m 53 now, so when I grow up, I will still want to work at the job I have now,” she said. “I absolutely love working with these women at The Launch Pad, so when I grow up, I just want to be better. I want to be a master’s-level addiction counselor. I want to work with women with addiction.”
Webber wasn’t the only UTC Social Work Day on the Hill honoree. Seniors Hannah Kean Davis and Emma Shavers won the state policy presentation competition for BSWs.
Davis, who gave the presenter speech—as only one person is allowed to present—is a graduate of Sale Creek (Tennessee) High School. Shavers, a native of Franklin, Tennessee, also is a business administration minor.
After Davis and Shavers made an in-class presentation about how different funding streams can affect whether students can eat breakfast and lunch at school, their proposal was submitted for a Social Work Day on the Hill presentation.
“We could do a presentation about a bill that we either wanted to advocate for, amend or oppose that’s on the floor currently,” Davis explained, “so we wrote about a bill requiring all schools in Tennessee to provide free breakfast and lunch. We wanted to advocate for this bill.”
Davis and Shavers had the opportunity to speak with the bill’s sponsor, Bradley County Rep. Kevin Raper, to learn more.
“We had a meeting with him to talk about that, other legislative things and his perspective on being a representative,” Shavers said. “It was a really cool experience.”
Womack said most social workers do not come to the program because they want to do policy; they want to work directly with people in the community.
“Policy feels very distant from that,” she said, “so I feel like I have to do a lot of cheerleading around policy to get them enthusiastic about how decisions that get made—whether it’s at an agency, whether it has to do with grant funding, whether it has to do with what’s happening at the state or federal government level—really affects what they can do when they’re out there in those communities and those homes and those offices working with people directly.”
Added Shavers, “To find something you’re interested in, then you do some research, then to talk to the person who made it and better understand exactly what we were researching made it more real. It was really cool to see how our little passion about that turned into a bigger thing that Hannah got to share with a ton of people.”
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