WELCOME MESSAGE FROM OUR PRESIDENT

NCBAA President’s Statement
Spring, 2010.

Next month in Baltimore at the NCBAA Summer Board Retreat, our council will undergo a leadership change. At that time, I am privileged to hand over the gavel to President–elect, Dr. Carolyn Anderson, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. As we are poised to make that transition it is appropriate to provide a state-of-the council message.

Before that, however, I want to take a minute to thank the NCBAA board and the council membership for the opportunity to have served as your president for the past three years. This service to the council has provided me with tremendous opportunities for gaining perspectives, widening social and professional contacts, as well as personal and professional growth. Working with the board, I have been witness to what a creative and committed group of people who respect each other can accomplish. I give honor to the board, because any gains accomplished over my presidential tenure must appropriately be laid at their feet.

As NCBAA moves into 2010-11 we can feel good about a number of accomplishments. Among them I would list improved communications internally and externally due to the continued improvement of our web presence. We have undertaken strategic planning designed to bolster and to move forward our Leadership Development Institute for Midlevel Managers. Under the leaders hip of Dean Marian Shivers our Institute continues to grow and, beginning last October, collaborated with and was held in conjunction with the Lakin Institute for Mentored Leadership from the Presidents’ Roundtable. The Institute has spawned an alumni organization that holds great promise for effective networking and future placement opportunities. The plan is for the two institutes to continue to be offered at the same time again this fall in Houston.

Collocating the two leadership development opportunities is just one example of the growing collaboration between NCBAA and the Presidents’ Roundtable that has provided a much needed synergy for both groups. Both groups have continued to work on bringing visibility to the issues confronting young Black males through providing roundtables at AACC for the last several years and collaborating on a Black Male Summit in Philadelphia in 2008. At the NCBAA Leadership Awards Breakfast last April in Phoenix, we honored the founding members of the Presidents’ Roundtable and honored all current African-American CEOs. This spring the AACC Board was presented with a diversity statement and challenge with specific recommendations initiated by the Presidents’ Roundtable and cosigned and supported by the boards of AACC’s three ethnic affinity councils.

Collaboration has been a key focus of our organization and in addition to the continued work with the Presidents’ Roundtable; NCBAA has successfully worked with the National Hispanic and the National Asian Pacific Islander Councils to offer a preconvention workshop for the past two years at the AACC national convention. This workshop was oversubscribed last month in Seattle and we look to continuous growth of this concept with our colleagues.

We have been able to have some measure of success in most of the endeavors in which we have been involved in spite of an extremely challenging economy. We have suffered as all have suffered during the economic downturn. I would, as a last request as your president, ask for your continued commitment and engagement. We cannot exist without memberships, both individual and institutional. Together we can accomplish anything that we can conceive. Peace.

 

James L. Bennett, Ph.D., President