Great Lakes Winter Roundtable 2025

Priya Ranganathan, deputy executive director of the Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association, ran her first Winter Roundtable as chapter chair on February 13, 2025, a month into her term. Chapter regulars filled the same 12th-floor conference room as the year before, coats draped over chair backs against a Chicago February.

Ranganathan opened by naming her priorities for the chapter year: closer coordination with the Detroit-Columbus finance officers' circle, and a push to get more small associations into the mentorship pairing program launched the previous March. Wendell Szymanski, the Winter Roundtable's longest-running attendee, led a session on recruiting and mentoring new staff — a topic he's returned to nearly every year since the roundtable began.

The room worked through a second round of peer budget benchmarking, building on the previous year's exercise with an added question about staff turnover. Several attendees noted rising costs for liability insurance as the year's emerging budget line to watch.

Ranganathan closed the day by asking each attendee to name one chapter priority to raise at the chapter's spring meeting — a shift from the previous chair's practice of setting priorities from the front of the room.

The roundtable ran 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. with coffee, breakfast, and lunch included, free for chapter members.

As with every Winter Roundtable, the room is limited to Great Lakes chapter member organizations, and the format assumes a returning as well as first-time audience — new attendees are paired informally with a regular like Wendell Szymanski so no one sits through the day without a face they recognize.

Ranganathan's first year as chair drew a slightly younger mix of attendees than in past years, several of them staff sent in place of an executive director who couldn't travel — a pattern the chapter board plans to watch over 2025.