After first earning a Bachelor of Arts from the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, in 1961, Anne Adkins Weissenborn, Esq., began her professional career as a program specialist in the Teacher Exchange Section of the U.S. Office of Education in the fall of 1963. The next spring she completed all requirements for a Master of Arts at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where she had specialized in African studies. Desirous of spending time living in Africa, in July 1965 she began a year in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a volunteer teacher at a U.S.-funded secondary school for refugees from southern Africa administered by the African-American Institute. Later, in 1968, she earned her Master of Education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education with an emphasis on international education.
In mid-1968, Ms. Weissenborn returned to the African-American Institute via its office in Washington, D.C., as a program assistant before accepting a position at Western College as an instructor in, and later director of, intercultural studies from 1969 to 1971. Between 1972 and 1975, she served several stints as a consultant for TransCentury Corporation in Washington, where she recruited economic and educational development specialists for assignments with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Africa. During this same time frame, she also undertook an assignment with the Washington Office on Africa, related to support of economic sanctions legislation then before Congress and related to the British colony of Rhodesia. While working on her Doctor of Jurisprudence from the Catholic University of America, which she earned in 1977, she served as research assistant for the dean of the law school, worked as an intern for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the spring of 1976, and spent the final year of her law studies as an intern in the Office of Legal Counsel of USAID. She was admitted to the Maryland State Bar in 1977 and to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980, and has maintained affiliation with the bar associations of those jurisdictions ever since.
Ms. Weissenborn spent her entire post-graduate legal career with the Office of the General Counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), starting there in October 1977 and retiring in January 2003. Beginning as a staff attorney at this then-very new agency, she rose to senior attorney and later to several stints as an acting assistant general counsel. She also served as interim executive assistant to FEC commissioners in 1986 and in 2001.
Remaining active in her retirement, Ms. Weissenborn served as a substitute teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, mostly at the secondary level, from 2003 to 2009 and was co-program coordinator for Washington, D.C., study tours for students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Macau in the summers of 2007-2013. One of her favorite long-term volunteer commitments has been her involvement with the Western College Alumnae Association (WCAA), with which she has served many years as a trustee starting in 1996. She was WCAA board president from 2000 to 2002, and more recently has worked on legal agreements between the WCAA and the Miami University Foundation (MUF) and Miami University of Ohio (MU) itself. She also served on the board of directors of the MUF from 2001 to 2007, including as chair of its stewardship committee for two years. In 2012, she was presented with the Western College Alumnae Service Award.
Earlier, as a volunteer from 1974 to 1983, Ms. Weissenborn was part of the Task Force on Southern Africa with the Potomac Association of the United Church of Christ (UCC), working on various projects as part of the anti-apartheid presence in Washington. She was also part of the founding of the Shaw Community Center, originally Shaw Community Ministry (SCM), in Washington, D.C., in 1991. She represented her congregation, Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the SCM board of directors for 19 years, having served as its founding president from 1991 to 1994. Also as a volunteer, she worked with the UCC’s Washington Office on the 2005-06 Public Policy Briefing Book; is presently on the steering committee of the Palestine/Israel Network of the Central Atlantic Conference of the UCC; and has over the years been a member of the Potomac Association’s education committee and chair of its social action and missions committee.
