Message from the President, September 2021

Welcome back!

As this is my first column as your new GBA President, I wanted to begin by thanking our past President, Lisa Arthur for leaving everything in great shape and making it easy for me.

I was hoping to be writing to tell you that COVID is behind us (or mostly anyway) and we are moving to live meetings for all our Greensboro Bar Association activities: board meetings, membership meetings, seminars and events. As everyone knows the emergence of the Delta variant has changed a lot of plans and, unfortunately, has changed ours as well.

Based on the information available to us, we decided that our board meetings will be virtual, at least for September and October and our September membership meeting (September 15, 2021) will have to be virtual as well. We will decide on future meetings on a month by month basis. Of course, one plus about the virtual meetings is they are really easy to attend (you don’t even have to get up) so we hope to see a lot of members there. In addition to our speaker programs, we are working on some additional activities to at least simulate the networking we all like so much at the live meetings.

Speaking of speakers, our schedule is almost full through the May 2022 meeting and we have some great topics lined up. Our first speaker (September) is Mark Phillips, the president of Phillips Collection, one of the area’s best furniture companies and a leader in design. Mark has some great stories about the business and sourcing furniture materials in faraway places. You’ll like it.

We’ve also set up our committee leaders and committee members for the coming year and we’re looking forward to the energy they bring to all aspects of the GBA. Our Habitat for Humanity effort is cranking up again, thanks to the passion and work of Bill Cooke, the Habitat committee and others. The beginning of construction on the newest Habitat house has been delayed because of you know what but look for information from the committee on the new schedule and signups. It’s a great team building exercise and won’t cost you anything (except of course for the generous contributions to the effort we hope you’ll make).

Even though we’ve been working on the committees, there are still lots of opportunities for committee work and we always need volunteers. Please check the committees and see what interests you or just call any board member (including me) and we’ll make suggestions.

One committee I’m particularly interested in is the mentoring committee, chaired by Hillary Kies. It’s a great opportunity for the newer lawyers to meet and benefit from the more experienced (trying not to say older) ones.

The work of our sections also continues. As always our Young Lawyers Section has a full slate and we expect Family Law and Real Property to be active as well.

Despite the COVID thing, we look forward to a great year.

Desmond Sheridan
GBA President, 2021-2022