PresMessage
By Jennifer L. VanderVeen, CELA, CAP, Fellow
Greetings! I’m excited to be taking the reins as NAELA’s 32nd President, and I look forward to using this forum to keep you updated on what is going on with NAELA leadership and how we are working to maintain and strengthen NAELA’s status as the preeminent elder and special needs law organization.
NAELA is coming into a new phase of its life span. The Academy’s founders created elder law. Subsequent generations of leaders built NAELA into a robust, vibrant organization. Now, we are seeing young attorneys coming out of law school with the intention of being elder and special needs law attorneys. Today, sons and daughters of NAELA members are beginning their involvement with the Academy. As the organization undergoes this generational shift, the NAELA Board of Directors’ goal becomes changing the way we operate to accommodate the needs of this new group of attorneys while maintaining the principles and ideals of those who built this organization into the family it is today.
We see the challenges of the generational shift at the Board level when we sit down to allocate NAELA’s resources. The Board, with its range of experience and diversity of opinions, is in the process of completely re-evaluating our priorities to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all NAELA members while protecting what makes NAELA unique — our core beliefs and spirit. This will mean some hard decisions, some of which have been and will be unpopular. But every decision the Board makes is with one goal in mind — maximizing benefits to our members and maintaining the value of your NAELA dues.
As a membership organization, our primary revenue source is member dues. While NAELA has been lucky to avoid the membership decline being faced by similar organizations, we also haven’t been increasing. We need to grow our membership if we want to keep pace with the changing climate of elder and special needs law and meet the needs of our members.
Many of you have been asking what you can do to help me as President. Here’s what you can do: Find a young attorney who isn’t a NAELA member and help them get involved. If they’re an associate in your firm, support them in joining NAELA. If they’re striking out on their own and looking for some mentoring, the best gift you can give them is a NAELA membership.
My personal goal is to increase NAELA membership by 10 percent this year. To make that happen, I need 450 of you to reach out and bring in one new member. I think it’s a goal we can accomplish that will help set NAELA on the right path for the future.