Jane Curran accepted the distinguished service award established in her honor from 2014-15 Florida Bar Foundation President Emerson R. Thompson Jr.

Florida Bar Foundation President Emerson R. Thompson Jr. presented the inaugural Jane Elizabeth Curran Distinguished Service Award to Curran June 25 at the Foundation’s annual reception and dinner at the Boca Raton Resort & Club.

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 honored in recognition of her contributions to the Foundation, to the national IOLTA movement, and to access to justice statewide and nationally. She was recruited to The Florida Bar Foundation in 1982 to lead the organization as it launched the nation’s first Interest on Trust Accounts program, which was authorized by the Florida Supreme Court in 1981.

“Jane made this Foundation a national leader,” Thompson said. “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 was not only the Foundation’s executive director, but also the director of its Improvements in the Administration of Justice Grant Program, which has helped launch or fund a number of important projects, including the Innocence Project of Florida.

The award was sponsored by Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt of Miami.