President’s Perspective
Association, Foundation Maintain Focus On Core Values: What We Do, Not What We Say
This bar year, task forces of the North Carolina Bar Association and Foundation have undertaken comprehensive strategic planning to help our organizations adapt to changes in the legal profession and focus on the most effective ways to meet the evolving needs of lawyers across the state and serve the people of North Carolina.
This valuable exercise required us to pay careful attention to the core values of the North Carolina Bar Association and Foundation and consider how to preserve and strengthen these values. The mission of the NCBA is: “to serve the public and the legal profession by promoting the administration of justice and encouraging the highest standards of integrity, competence, civility and well-being of all members of the profession.” Focusing on this mission, we have explored how the NCBA will remain a trusted, inclusive forum for the legal profession by fostering meaningful dialogue with divergent perspectives and championing the core values of the rule of law.
In our country this year, many organizations connected to the legal profession have felt compelled to issue statements emphasizing their beliefs and values. Our Association and Foundation have focused on demonstrating our longstanding core values, through the work of our members and actions of our leadership boards.
Promoting the administration of justice and judicial independence is an essential core value of the NCBA. The Association adopted a standing resolution on this issue in 2017 that is still in full effect today. Further, in 2018, the Association produced a helpful public education video on the importance of judicial independence. The video’s content continues to be poignantly relevant today. It can be viewed on the Association’s website and states that “the NCBA believes that our courts should be free to decide our citizens’ cases based only on the evidence and the law, and that’s why we’ve sought to protect an independent judiciary for our state’s citizens since 1899.”
I am grateful for statements like these which articulate our Association’s mission and values; I believe that these ideals are best communicated by our members through their actions. For example, the North Carolina Bar Association benefits the legal profession through a wide spectrum of continuing legal education programs. Our committees, divisions and thirty-one distinct legal practice sections have generated multiple pro bono initiatives, such as Wills for Heroes and the Entrepreneurs Assistance Program. The Association has also provided the public with a standard Purchase and Sale of Real Estate form used by realtors across the state and a North Carolina estate administration manual relied on by clerks in all North Carolina counties. Equally important, our practice sections engage in careful, proactive legislative efforts to promote improved laws for the people of North Carolina.
Most of the lawyers I know decided to go to law school because they had a desire to help others. Our North Carolina Bar Foundation provides the structure and staff to enable our volunteer members to engage in meaningful pro bono services responding to unmet legal needs for the people of our State. This accomplishes the vision of the NCBF to achieve “a vibrant North Carolina where legal services are available to all, regardless of ability to pay; where members of the legal profession provide community service and leadership that profoundly impacts the public, thereby demonstrating the value of our profession to society; and where all North Carolinians understand and have confidence in a legal system that serves them.”
Through programs such as Disaster Legal Services, where this year, our Foundation and its volunteer members contributed hundreds of hours to help the victims of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, lawyers and legal professionals aided people in what may be their greatest moment of need in their lives. Our Bar Association and Foundation work best when we identify opportunities to help people with needs that legal professionals are uniquely suited to meet and then devise a means to act on it.
Understanding and communicating the mission, beliefs and vision of an organization is valuable. However, actively engaging in endeavors to carry that out on behalf of the public and the legal profession requires commitment, investment of time and resources and many times, significant sacrifice. I am astounded by the many Association members and Foundation volunteers who demonstrate these characteristics by their devotion to the public, our organizations and their programs and pro bono efforts.
Though it has been said that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” I appreciate the words of Mr. Rogers, who said: “I feel the greatest gift we can give to anybody is the gift of our honest self. . . . I think that what matters is what we do, not what we say.” – Fred Rogers, from “The World According to Mister Rogers”
Kimberly H. Stogner serves as president of the North Carolina Bar Association and the North Carolina Bar Foundation.