I must extend the most sincere thanks to The Latino Coalition in conferring on me this much treasured Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award, and I must particularly convey gratitude to my excellent friends CiCi Rojas, the TLC President, and another of its leading lights, the distinguished Jeanette Prenger. Whose name is near synonymous with
Entrepreneurship — the body of skills and the quest for social value that
she has exemplified with notable success.
As for me, I am immensely honored by this award. When I was in the midst of beginning the Dialogue the organization DIALOGUE ON DIVERSITY, a non-profit -- a project that was in train some 35 years ago, I could not know whether it would work. The atmosphere in Washington was then cynical -- nothing comparable to t0day’s enormously venomous political -- and for us it was not easy to get noticed. But we stuck to it and our message cut through the noise. We stayed true to our mission, and in the over three decades following we have touched, I am sure, the thoughts and the hearts of Latinos and Latinas, tackling some of the biggest and most daunting public policy and social issues, but always, we hope, focusing on both economic aspects and the actual all-round goals of real public policy.
Among these have been data privacy and surveillance, health care, complicated with its special privacy problems, income inequality, education and the STEM and STEAM debates, and, surely most important, the skills of Entrepreneurship, and the amazing transmutation of economy and society by the advent of Information Technology.
But for the achievement of both skilled entrepreneurship and an increasingly potent IT environment we would not be here celebrating a grand national success story. The issues we have tackled with in Dialogue on Diversity have ranged from domestic violence, employment discrimination, education and immigration —-— we hope that we have always sought out diverse voices and points of view.
It has thus been a long road and along the way we managed to learn a great deal. We have met some amazing people and hope to have changed the world as we strive for the better society. Again, thank you all very much. The Dialogue, and I myself, hope to render useful service in the days ahead. Muchas Gracias !
