Meet the New Hope College Board Members

HOLLAND — Five new members have been elected to the Hope College Board of Trustees.

The university announced the induction of new members on Tuesday, July 23, and also announced that two members had been re-elected to second terms and that a new executive committee had been appointed.

The new board members are P.J. Huizenga of Hinsdale, Illinois; Eric Keen of Nashville, Tennessee; Steven McMullen of Holland; Dara Spearman of Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Frances Traisman of Seattle, Washington. Each will serve for three years, except McMullen, who will serve for four years.

The new members replace Llena Chavis of Holland, Sandra Gaddy of Caledonia, Nathan Hart of Holland, David Paul of Rochester, New York, and Timothy Vande Bunte of Holland, each of whom had completed their terms on the board.

Andrew Ohm of Seattle and Laura Paredes of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, were elected to a second three-year term.

Stephen Boerigter of Los Alamos, New Mexico, will continue to serve as chairman of the board, and Matthew Wixson of Ann Arbor will remain vice chairman. Victoria Brunn of Seattle has been elected secretary.

In addition to Boerigter, Wixson and Brunn, the six-member executive committee includes Lisa Joldersma of Washington, D.C., who will serve as chair of the Mission Protection Committee; Ohm, who will remain chair of the Mission Living Committee; and Carol Van Andel of Ada, appointed chair of the Mission Sustainment Committee.

Huizenga graduated from Hope in 1998 with a degree in accounting and earned a master’s degree in finance and management from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is currently a managing director at Huizenga Capital Management.

Keen is a co-founder and partner of Civitas Growth Partners, which was founded earlier this year to support “microcap software and technology-enabled services companies.” He previously worked for various middle-market private equity firms.

Keen also serves on the board of Siloam Health and Currey Ingram Academy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in finance and political science from the University of Illinois in 2000.

McMullen is a professor of economics at Hope College. He teaches courses in microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, environmental economics, and the history of economic thought.

He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Faith and Economics, hosts the Faithful Economy podcast, and is a fellow at the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics. McMullen earned a BA in accounting from Bethel College and a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina.

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Spearman is the owner and medical director of Radiant Dermatology Associates in Fort Wayne, which she founded last year. She has served as president of the Indiana Academy of Dermatology and co-chair of the Indiana State Medical Society’s DEI Committee.

Spearman earned degrees in biology and psychology from Hope University in 1999 and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 2004.

Traisman, a Hope graduate, is the senior vice president of sales for the Seattle Mariners of Major League Baseball. She co-founded the Seattle Chapter of Women in Sports and Events in January 2020 and is a member of the advisory board for the MBA in Sports and Entertainment Management at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.

For more information, visit hope.edu.

—Contact reporter Mitchell Boatman at [email protected].

This article originally appeared in The Holland Sentinel: Five new members named to Hope College Board of Trustees