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Professional
Profile: Anna
Washington, M.A.T., M.Ed.
Anna felt a calling in the 50s growing up in Oxford, NC to do something
about racism, rebelling against the disparity between people thinking of
themselves as fair-minded & yet treating a whole segment of the human family
unfairly. That insight has broadened to the mission “bring people together.”
Before going back to school to become an instructional designer, Anna
taught German in Carnage Junior High & Ligon Senior High during the second
year of integration in Raleigh, NC, the year that both Robert Kennedy & Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., were murdered.
For the bulk of Anna’s professional career, she has worked as an
instructional designer, creating courses and teaching materials, working as a
team with subject-matter experts, educators/trainers & production experts.
She worked in both business and higher education, at Nortel Networks, Research
& Evaluation Associates, the Instrument Society of America, the Centers for
Disease Control, & the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
Nursing, Public Health, Medicine, Pharmacology, Education, & Computer
Science. She created courses, self-study workbooks, job-aids, videotapes,
internet-based courses, etc. for group home houseparents, unemployment insurance
claims adjudicators, health care providers, etc., on such topics as listening
skills, telephone interviewing, hotline counseling, Hepatitis B, working with
the AIDS patient, virtual reality research, principles of grounding,
reproductive epidemiology, allergen skin testing, etc. She also manages
large-scale projects & coordinates outreach programs. She puts on
train-the-trainer workshops & evaluates faculty & teachers’ teaching
skills.
Anna has had a parallel volunteer career. First as a student at UNC-CH she
marched the streets for the integration of Chapel Hill in the 60s & was
active in the committee for the United Nations in the campus YMCA. Then she
served on the board of a parents’ cooperative preschool. She managed &
coordinated the first Soup Kitchen in Chapel Hill for the Interfaith Council for
Social Service & served on that board for 3 years. Over 16 years, Anna’s
grounding in working with groups developed through coordinating weekly “Search
for God” study group meetings using the Edgar Cayce “Guidelines to
Small Group Work.” She organized & facilitated a leadership-training
program to create a bureau of public speakers. She served 3 terms on her church
board & was active on the Tapestry Committee, helping lead several community
gatherings, consciousness-raising sessions using the Color of Fear film,
& a weekend-long community building. She organizes activities to bring
people together: dances, murder mystery dinner parties, volleyball, bridge,
hiking, & now bocce.
Anna has lived in Chapel Hill for 40 years & in the same big old
house, located behind the University, for 26 years, where she is active in the
Westside Neighborhood Association & has a bocce court in the backyard. She
says her greatest accomplishment is being friends with her ex-husband. Her
daughter, son-in-law, & two granddaughters live in Chicago. They raise kids
& work in public policy.
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The Leadership and Empowerment Institute, Inc. 
