Dennis Bidwell, Board Chair of National Priorities Project (NPP), is pleased to announce that Nora Ranney will become NPP’s new Executive Director, effective March 14, 2016. After a national search, Nora’s selection as the new leader of NPP was ratified by the Board of Directors last week.
“We are thrilled to have Nora’s public policy expertise and non-profit leadership experience coming to NPP,” said Mr. Bidwell. “We consider ourselves very fortunate that our search yielded such a strong candidate.”
Ms. Ranney joins NPP with more than 20 years of experience working for social and economic justice, including leadership in advocacy and electoral campaigns, lobbying, organizing, and public policy. Most recently, Nora served as Program Officer for the Open Society Foundations, where her grant making focused on civic engagement issues and a new place-based initiative. Prior to this, she served as Legislative Director with the Progressive States Network managing a policy team supporting state elected officials interested in progressive policies; as the Director of State Advocacy with the national American Civil Liberty Union’s LGBT Project; and as a policy analyst for the Speaker of the New York City Council. She worked on the campaign of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, and led public education and advocacy campaigns to improve the lives of low- and moderate-income workers with the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center and United for a Fair Economy. In Minnesota, her work helped pass the nation’s first state legislation linking corporate tax subsidies with accountability and a living wage.
Nora holds a Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Public Finance from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
“I am excited to work with NPP’s talented and dedicated staff to produce more of the research and analyses NPP is so respected for,” said Ranney. “I am eager to get this important work into the hands, hearts, and minds of those who care about a federal budget that reflects the priorities of the people it is meant to represent.”
National Priorities Project makes the nation’s complex federal budget transparent and accessible so people can exercise their right and responsibility to oversee and influence how their tax dollars are spent. The organization illuminates how our nation’s unrestrained military budget and lopsided tax policies contribute to anemic domestic investment that perpetuates income and wealth inequality. NPP is known for its sophisticated yet accessible budget analysis, a current example of which is the organization’s recently released collection of revealing graphics that document the president’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal.
In 2014 NPP was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its pioneering work tracking federal military spending and promoting a federal budget representing Americans’ desire for increased funding addressing unemployment, education, health care and the need to build a green economy.
