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245 members hold 104 Hill meetings on Advocacy Day
Mid-Atlantic chapter hosted its second Advocacy Day. Members carried one concrete ask to Capitol Hill: raise the volunteer mileage rate.
Two hundred forty-five members held 104 meetings with congressional offices at NANA's Advocacy Day in Washington on April 15 — up from 210 members and 96 meetings in 2024. The Mid-Atlantic chapter hosted the day for the second year under chapter chair Marcus Idowu, again drawing members from all six of NANA's chapters to the capital.
Director of Public Policy Simone Radcliffe opened the morning with a review of the spring's active policy files, then handed the floor to Idowu for the year's ask: raising the federal charitable mileage rate, which sets how much a volunteer can be reimbursed tax-free for driving on behalf of a nonprofit. The rate has not moved in years, even as the comparable business mileage rate has risen repeatedly, leaving chapter and board volunteers who drive to meetings covering a growing share of the cost themselves.
Emeka Nwosu-Hart, vice president of government relations at the Coalition of Family Farm Lenders and co-chair of the Mid-Atlantic government-relations working group, led message training built around that single ask rather than a broader policy menu. Several delegations reported that congressional staffers were more receptive to one concrete number than to the multi-issue briefings NANA has brought in past years.
"Nobody argues with a mileage rate that hasn't moved since gas was two dollars a gallon," Idowu said. "That's not a hard ask — it's an obvious one."
Meetings ran in two blocks grouped by state delegation, with a working-lunch debrief between them. At an afternoon report-back roundtable, Idowu and Nwosu-Hart collected follow-up questions from committee staff for the policy team to track, without predicting how any pending request would land.
The mileage-rate push is the centerpiece of NANA's Volunteer Mileage Rate Parity policy file, which asks Congress to tie the charitable rate to the business rate going forward so it adjusts automatically rather than requiring a separate act of Congress each time fuel costs rise. NANA's policy team will follow up with each office that took a meeting over the coming weeks, and is asking member associations to share their own chapter leaders' mileage figures so the next round of comments has real numbers behind it.
Cobbleridge Broadcast again recorded the morning briefing for members who could not travel to Washington.