Pacific Northwest Spring Forum 2025

The Pacific Northwest chapter drew executive directors and membership staff from Seattle and Portland to the waterfront on May 15, 2025, for a forum built around one question: how do you staff an association without a lease.

Signe Thorvaldsen, executive director of the Cascadia Forest Products Council, opened with the case study attendees kept returning to over lunch. Her four-person staff has worked remote-first since 2020, coordinating 140 member companies across Washington and Oregon from home offices rather than a Tacoma headquarters. She walked through what changed in hiring, in board meetings, and in the annual member survey when there was no central address to point to.

Arjun Talwar-Hughes, a NANA board director and CEO of the Council of Municipal Transit Planners, followed with a session on recruiting and onboarding staff who never set foot in a shared office. CMTP runs a distributed technical staff across four states, and Talwar-Hughes described the onboarding checklist his team built after two new hires spent their first month unsure who to ask for help.

Ravi Deshpande-Cole, CMTP's director of technology, closed the morning with a walk-through of the tools his council relies on for a distributed staff — the same systems his team tested a year before NANA's own portal migration.

The afternoon moved into peer roundtables, where attendees compared notes chapter to chapter on stipends for home-office equipment, time-zone-friendly meeting schedules, and how to keep a remote hire from feeling like an afterthought at the annual meeting.

The forum met at the Seattle Waterfront Conference Center, a 10-minute walk from the Colman Dock ferry terminal and on the RapidRide C Line for attendees arriving from the airport by transit. Registration ran $40 for members and $85 for non-members, with the fee covering meals and a printed session guide.