Ona Alston Dosunmu

Ona Alston Dosunmu is building one of the largest bar associations in America. Only a few years after the State Bar of California split into a regulatory bar (the State Bar of California) and a voluntary membership organization (the California Lawyers Association), Ona is charged with building an association that will compel California’s more than 200,000 attorneys to join. With a Georgetown Law J.D., an M.A. in Sociology from Howard University, and years of experience at the Children’s Law Center, the Association of Corporate Counsel, and as General Counsel and Vice President for the celebrated Brookings Institution for sixteen years, Ona draws from a broad range of experiences. Ona has described her mission as creating, “an organizational culture of trust, transparency, positivity, and respect.” As she once said in an interview about recruiting young attorneys, “People say they’re not joiners, but I suspect otherwise. They’re the future and I’m not letting them slip through our fingers.”