Bar Foundation honors Curran
The Florida Bar Foundation presented the inaugural Jane Elizabeth Curran Distinguished Service Award to it former long-time executive director, Jane Curran.
The award was established to honor Curran for her 33 years as the organization’s founding executive director, and it will be given henceforth in her name.
“ I was blessed for more than three decades with the most committed people in the country in the Foundation and in our legal services grantees that made access to justice to the neediest in our society their highest priority,” Curran said. “I am also very proud of the many IOTA initiatives pioneered in Florida with the help of our forward-looking Bar and Supreme Court that were later adopted throughout the nation.”
Curran was recruited to the Foundation in 1982 as it launched the nation’s first IOTA program.
“Jane made this Foundation a national leader,” said Foundation President Emerson R. Thompson, Jr. “She led the efforts to make the state’s IOTA program mandatory, to achieve interest rate comparability so that IOTA accounts earn the same interest rates available to similar bank customers, and to create innovative grant programs to improve legal services delivery.
Curran also served as director of the Foundation’s Improvements in the Administration of Justice Grant Program, which has helped launch or fund a number of projects, including the Innocence Project of Florida.
