Members elect Pruitt-Ames and Talwar-Hughes to the board

NANA members have elected Yolanda Pruitt-Ames, executive director of the Council of Early Childhood Educators, and Arjun Talwar-Hughes, chief executive officer of the Council of Municipal Transit Planners, to the board of directors. The ballot closed September 18, the second Wednesday of the month, as it does every year.

Both directors will be seated January 1, 2025, and will serve three-year terms — the first class elected since the board's July bylaws review replaced two-year terms with three-year terms, capped at two terms per director. Benjamin Oduya, NANA's secretary, said the longer terms were already shaping how members thought about the ballot.

"We heard from members that a three-year commitment made them think harder about who they were voting for," Oduya said. "A couple of chapters told us they ran informal candidate forums this year that they'd never bothered with before."

Pruitt-Ames brings early-childhood education perspective to the board, leading an association of 11,000 members and 37 staff — one of the larger member organizations in NANA's network. She has said she plans to focus on the board's inclusion committee, which she will chair once seated.

Talwar-Hughes brings a transportation-sector view, having led the Council of Municipal Transit Planners through its own technology transition, including a single sign-on migration his organization's technology team completed roughly a year before NANA undertook a similar project for its own member portal. Talwar-Hughes is expected to serve as the board's liaison to NANA's digital program.

NANA's ballot process allows any member organization in good standing to vote for open board seats, with results certified by staff and reported to the outgoing board at its next meeting. This year's turnout was consistent with recent years, according to Oduya's office, though exact participation figures are not published publicly.

The two directors will attend their first board meeting in January 2025, alongside the annual election of officers for the coming term. Between now and then, both will join a standard new-director orientation covering board committees, fiduciary duties, and the history of recent board decisions, including the bylaws changes adopted just two months before their election.

This is the second consecutive year NANA has elected two new directors to the board, following the two-year officer and committee cycle the board has settled into since 2020. Oduya said the office plans to publish a short orientation guide for future candidates, drawn partly from the questions Pruitt-Ames and Talwar-Hughes asked during their own campaigns, to make the process less opaque to first-time candidates in future ballots. He added that the board expects to keep electing roughly two directors a year going forward, in line with the size of the board and the new three-year term length.