Two New Chapter Chairs

Two brand-new chapter chairs, one month into the job, compare notes with host Amara Obiledu. Priya Ranganathan, Deputy Executive Director at the Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association, took over the Great Lakes chapter. Marcus Idowu, Chief Operating Officer at the Society of Accessible Design Professionals, took over Mid-Atlantic — the largest chapter in the network. Same start date, very different chapter sizes.

• Priya Ranganathan — Chapter Chair, Great Lakes; Deputy Executive Director, Great Lakes Orchard Growers Association.

• Marcus Idowu — Chapter Chair, Mid-Atlantic; Chief Operating Officer, Society of Accessible Design Professionals.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:25 Two different chapters, same start date

• 07:00 What the outgoing chairs actually handed off

• 13:10 Running a 98-organization chapter versus a 265-organization one

• 18:50 The Winter Roundtable, and inheriting a program that already works

• 24:20 Mid-Atlantic's proximity to national staff — help or complication?

• 29:40 What surprised each of them in month one

Host: You both started as chapter chairs on the same date, January 2025, but your chapters could hardly be more different in size. Priya, set the scene for Great Lakes.

Priya Ranganathan: Great Lakes runs 98 member organizations, based out of Chicago, and we meet monthly at 55 Wacker Drive for a roundtable that's been running on the third Thursday for years before I took over. It's a close chapter — 98 organizations is small enough that I already knew a meaningful share of the members personally before I became chair, through the Orchard Growers Association's own industry contacts.

Host: Marcus, Mid-Atlantic is the largest chapter in the network. 265 organizations.

Marcus Idowu: Right, and that scale changes the job in a way I wasn't fully prepared for. We meet bi-monthly, odd months, third Thursday, at NANA's headquarters here in DC, and I can't claim to know 265 organizations the way Priya can describe knowing a meaningful share of 98. My first month has been more about building relationships with a handful of frequent attendees I can lean on to represent the wider membership's concerns, because I simply can't have a personal relationship with every one of them.

Host: What did your outgoing chairs actually hand you, in practical terms?

Priya Ranganathan: A genuinely detailed handoff, which I'm grateful for. Great Lakes runs the Winter Roundtable every February, capped at 40 attendees, plus a mentorship pairing program for staff new to association management that runs twelve-month cohorts starting each March, and a quarterly virtual finance officers' circle between Detroit and Columbus. I inherited all three programs mid-cycle, essentially, and the outgoing chair walked me through exactly where each one stood.

Marcus Idowu: Mine was similarly thorough, though Mid-Atlantic's programming looks different — we host joint policy briefings with NANA's own public policy team, since we're right here at headquarters, we're the host chapter for Advocacy Day every April, and we run peer working groups specifically for general counsel and government-relations staff across member organizations. That last one surprised me. I didn't expect a regional chapter to be running something that specialized.

Host: Marcus, does being the host chapter for national programs like Advocacy Day complicate the job, or make it easier?

Marcus Idowu: Both, honestly. It's easier in the sense that national staff is down the hall, literally, so coordination on something like the policy briefings doesn't require the scheduling friction a chapter further away would face. It's more complicated in the sense that Mid-Atlantic members sometimes assume chapter programming and national programming are the same thing, run by the same people, and part of my job in this first month has been drawing that line clearly — what's genuinely chapter-led versus what we're simply hosting for the national calendar.

Host: Priya, the Winter Roundtable is capped at 40. Is that cap ever a point of tension, given the chapter has 98 organizations?

Priya Ranganathan: It comes up, yes. The cap exists because the format is deliberately intimate — it's not a large conference, it's meant to be a room small enough for genuine peer conversation. I've had two members ask why they were waitlisted this year, and my answer has been that I'd rather protect what makes the Roundtable valuable than expand it and lose that. Whether that's the right long-term call, I genuinely don't know yet. It's one of the first real judgment calls I've had to make as chair.

Host: What's surprised each of you most, one month in?

Marcus Idowu: How much of the job is translation, not decision-making. A lot of my time so far has gone into explaining national-level context — why a policy position was taken, what a bylaws change actually means — to members who trust me to interpret it for them, rather than me actually deciding anything myself. I didn't expect that to be the majority of the work this early.

Priya Ranganathan: For me it's been the mentorship program, honestly. I inherited eleven active pairings mid-cohort, and each one has its own specific dynamic — some pairs meet weekly, some barely at all, and I've had to figure out quickly which ones need a nudge from me and which are better left alone. Nobody handed me a playbook for that judgment call either. It's been learn-as-you-go.

Host: Last question for both of you. What would you tell someone considering becoming a chapter chair, based on this first month?

Marcus Idowu: Ask your outgoing chair more questions than feel necessary, before you start, not after. I had a good handoff and I still found myself calling my predecessor twice in the first three weeks with questions I should have asked earlier.

Priya Ranganathan: I'd add: expect the job to be more personal than you think. It's not a committee seat where you show up and vote. People call you directly about their own organization's problems, and you have to actually want that kind of relationship to find the role rewarding rather than draining.

Host: Priya, Marcus, thank you both for comparing notes this openly.

Priya Ranganathan: Thank you for having us.

Marcus Idowu: Same. Ask us again at the one-year mark and I suspect the answers will be different.

Host: Before we close, I want to ask one more thing, since you've both now sat through your first chapter budget conversation with national staff. Was there anything about how chapter resourcing actually works that neither of you expected?

Priya Ranganathan: I expected less flexibility than there actually is. Great Lakes gets to decide how its own modest chapter budget gets spent — whether that's catering for the Roundtable or materials for the mentorship program — rather than national dictating a fixed allocation. I'd assumed, coming in, that a chapter this size would have less discretion than that.

Marcus Idowu: I had the opposite surprise, in a way. Mid-Atlantic's proximity to headquarters meant I assumed national staff time was effectively part of our chapter's resources, informally. It isn't, not in any guaranteed sense — Julian's team supports every chapter, and I had to learn not to treat that support as uniquely ours just because we're down the hall.

Host: That's a useful note to end on for anyone considering the role. One truly final question. Do the two of you expect to coordinate with each other going forward, given you started the same day, or does each chapter mostly operate on its own island?

Priya Ranganathan: We've already talked more than I expected to, honestly, precisely because we started together. Comparing notes on something as simple as how to run a first roundtable agenda has been more useful than anything in the written handoff materials, just because Marcus and I are living through the same learning curve in real time, even if our chapters look nothing alike.

Marcus Idowu: Agreed. I'd guess the six chapter chairs generally don't coordinate as much as they could, since each one is solving problems at a different scale. Starting alongside Priya has made me want to change that, at least informally — a standing call between chairs, regardless of chapter size, seems like an obvious idea that I haven't heard proposed before.

Host: That's a useful note to end on for anyone considering the role. Thank you both again.

Priya Ranganathan: Thank you.

Marcus Idowu: Thanks for having us.