Martha Huizenga · 2012 Honoree

Growing up in Dolton, a suburb on the south side of Chicago, Martha Huizenga went to a big public high school. She played clarinet in the marching band, was on the swim and gymnastics teams, and enjoyed being involved in school activities. She went to college in Iowa, and then on to graduate school for a degree in accounting. Along the way she switched course, entering the burgeoning field of telecommunications. A job as an accounts auditor for MCI brought her to Washington where she met Matt Wade, who worked for the competing Bell Atlantic. They married in 1997 and moved to the Hill where they now run DC Access, a wireless Internet firm with 1,000 clients. And Martha has found a second career as a community volunteer. “I am my mother’s daughter,” she says, noting that her mother not only worked full-time but was a PTA member, serves on the vestry of her church and is a volunteer election judge. “I am a joiner.” 

Martha spent four years as vice president and then president of the Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals, which promotes the Hill as a place to do business and offers opportunities for networking. In 2009, she joined the board of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, becoming an active member of the grants committee, which evaluates roughly 80 requests for funding twice a year. She reads grant proposals and often visits the programs seeking underwriting. Martha has also been active on the fundraising end of things for the foundation. She was part of the original team that created the popular “Literary Feast” – 35 separate dinner parties planned each fall that attract hundreds of guests and raise about $25,000 for the foundation’s school-based grants. Last year she took over as chairman of that event.

Martha has long had an interest in the issues surrounding homelessness, which she has addressed both by making and serving hundreds of sandwiches for McKenna’s Wagon and Martha’s Table over many years, and by volunteering for service on the board of the Capitol Hill Group Ministry. In her capacity on the board, she helped plan several annual fundraising golf tournaments, and was part of the team that saw the organization through a change in leadership. Each spring, Martha devotes an evening a week to the Group Ministry’s tax clinic, which offers assistance free of charge to any D.C. resident with an annual income below $57,000.  

Busy as she is, Martha still finds time to pursue multiple hobbies. She competes in triathlons twice a year; in a recent “Olympic” event she swam a mile, rode a bike for 26 miles and ran ten kilometers, all in two hours and forty minutes. And despite being on the cutting edge of technology in her professional life, in her free time she appreciates traditional pursuits. Her grandmother taught her to knit and she is always making something. Martha is also a devotee of old-fashioned film photography. Using her father’s 30- year-old Pentax, she shoots landscapes and develops the film in a darkroom at the Smithsonian, where she takes classes. She loves the moment when an image emerges from the murk of a pan of developing liquid. “It’s magical,” she says, “just magical.” The same might be said of Martha’s energy and enthusiasm which have contributed so much to our neighborhood.