Client Spotlight: NOMA

Our first client spotlight shines on NOMA! For Black History Month, we highlight the history-making organization with which we worked as one of our first official strategic planning efforts: the National Organization of Minority Architects. I am anxious to feature also the entity’s awesome leaders at the time: President Kimberly Dowdell, AIA, NOMAC and Executive Director Tiffany D. Brown, Assoc. AIA, NOMA. I cannot begin to express my profound gratitude for Kimberly, who held the belief, trust, and confidence in our ability to steward NOMA’s visioning process – the first in many years – in the MIDST of the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. Twenty-plus NOMA board members and leaders met with me patiently and productively via Zoom over several days. Their words and phrases collected through numerous exercises on creative expression and future thinking became the impressive framework for NOMA’s ambitious and aspirational 2021-2023 Strategic Plan.

I have been a part of dozens of strategic planning efforts for a number of AIA state and local components, other not-for-profit and non-profit entities, and design firms of all disciplines. Yet, the NOMA plan remains one of the standouts in my mind. I would like to think that the goals, strategies, and tactics within this strategic plan offered a chart to help NOMA’s leadership safely and appropriately navigate the troubled waters that followed in May, June, and well beyond. They truly stepped forward in bold ways to exert courageous leadership across the industry, engender a strong sense of connectedness, and inspire engagement on issues of crucial societal importance. The biggie from the plan was to, “Investigate the feasibility of petitioning ACSA, AIA, AIAS, NAAB, and NCARB for inclusion as the sixth ‘collateral’ organization representing architects.” This, within three short months, happened … to the joy of many!

Some have said, “Hope is not a strategy.” I beg to differ. In NOMA’s case, we tied hopes and dreams together with wishes and desires – tethered by the reality of their given resources – to create a bundle of balloons with powerful uplift.

With such visionary purpose, NOMA’s momentum remains on an exciting and beneficial trajectory. A strategic plan helps set the course, yes, but the strong leaders at the helm breathe life into the words to ensure the organization’s enduring accomplishment on behalf of the profession and society! Congratulations to just such leaders: Kimberly Dowdell, Tiffany D. Brown, MBA, NOMA, Assoc. AIA, Pascale Sablan FAIA,NOMAC,LEED AP, and Bryan C. Lee Jr NOMA, FAIA!

(For Kimberly’s kind testimonial, please see our website, www.thethreeaspens.com.)