MCCA® A Year in Review
At the risk of being accused of tooting our own horn, we feel pretty good about all that was accomplished and thank you very much for your support…
At a recent MCCA® staff meeting, the six of us agreed that it feels like 2004 just flew past. Yet, we are already hard at work preparing for next year. It’s a never-ending effort to advance a mission to which we all feel passionately committed, and we hope you’ve appreciated working with us as much as we have working with you.
At the risk of being accused of tooting our own horn, we feel pretty good about all that was accomplished and thank you very much for your support, valuable time, ideas, enthusiasm, and financial contributions. We also extend a very special thank you to Winston & Strawn for their generous contribution of our office space in downtown Washington, DC, without which MCCA would have no headquarters to serve the legal community.
Looking back, we take pride in the many programs and services that MCCA offered to our community of supporters this year: 5 Employer of Choice awards dinners, 8 networking receptions, 6 diversity dialogue panel discussions, 2 major conferences; 1 golf tournament; 6 free D&B Brief professional development teleclasses; 6 free Chance2Chat online interviews with leaders in the profession; 6 free monthly Live Vine newsletters; 12 free “Hot Jobs” monthly email alerts; and 6 issues of Diversity & the Bar®. We’re also launching a new scholarship program to send disadvantaged college graduates to law school and we named it in honor of MCCA’s founder and first executive director, Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr.
MCCA distributed without charge, thousands of copies of our award-winning Creating Pathways to Diversity® research reports. We responded to thousands of telephone inquiries and emails from people all over the world, the vast majority of whom turned to MCCA as a resource to address their professional development needs and to strengthen their diversity programs. We also presented about $70,000.00 in grants to jump start other organizations’ diversity efforts. And I’m afraid to count the hundreds of thousands of miles we traveled to present our own programs, support those of our partner bar associations, and speak at off-sites, conferences, diversity councils, and special events.
As we draw to the end of 2004 and look to the promise of 2005, let me close by thanking some very special people, the members of the MCCA staff: Shawn Boynes, director of programs; Tiffany Payne, director of membership and development; Jen Chen, program development manager; Aisha Kenney Johnson, office administrator; and Donna Crook, executive assistant. You’re the best!
Veta T. Richardson
From the November/December 2004 issue of Diversity & The Bar®