BONNIE E. MULLEN, Maura Mellen Administrative Professional Award. The Maura Mellen Administrative Professional Award honors an administrative staff member who has made an outstanding contribution to the delivery of zealous and effective advocacy for CPCS clients. The award recognizes that administrative staff members perform many critical roles in the provision of zealous representation to CPCS clients.
Bonnie Mullen has been an outstanding member of the CPCS staff for 39 years. She is the consummate Administrative Assistant – smart, professional, highly organized, dedicated, hardworking, responsible and independent.
Bonnie joined the Public Defender Division Appeals Unit in 1979, and soon mastered the intricate rules governing the preparation of briefs for submission to the SJC and the Appeals Court. Over the next 36 years Bonnie typed (!), bound, and – most importantly – corrected countless briefs. When word processing, and then computers, finally came to CPCS, Bonnie learned all the ins and outs of WordPerfect, cleverly formatting documents to meet those pesky page limit rules.
In early 2015 Bonnie was persuaded to take a temporary assignment as the Administrative Assistant to the Training Coordinator. She arrived just as preparations for the Annual Training Conference were getting underway. Bonnie was immediately swamped with a myriad of administrative tasks for which she had no training – and handled it all with aplomb. Soon we welcomed Bonnie as the permanent AA to the Training Coordinator, General Counsel and Deputy Chief of the Private Counsel Division. As a result of Bonnie’s excellent skills, judgment, dependability and appropriate exercise of discretion, she also functions as the primary back-up to the Chief Counsel’s Executive Assistant.
In addition to successfully handling numerous massive projects, Bonnie has emerged as a leader. She trains staff on the use of CPCS and other vendor resources and coaches new training personnel on policies and procedures. Numerous staff outside the Administration Unit have commented on the excellence of Bonnie’s work, and how much they enjoy working with her.
Overall, Bonnie is an unusually talented AA who has been doing outstanding work for this organization for nearly 40 years. It is difficult to imagine someone more deserving of the Mellen award.