Carol Ann Lemon

Carol Ann Lemon brings a rare pedigree to Albany advocacy: 16 years at the bedside as a registered nurse in acute-care settings across Schenectady County, followed by more than a decade as one of the state's most trusted lobbyists. She began her advocacy career organizing hospital workers to join the New York State Nurses Association before transitioning to NYSNA full-time as its lead lobbyist, managing its legislative agenda and building the relationships with elected officials that would define the rest of her career. "She has solid relationships with all the legislators across the aisle," one nominator wrote, "and gets results."

At Malkin & Ross, Lemon has led high-impact campaigns across healthcare, human rights, and child welfare. She spearheaded the successful effort to give adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates, and played a key role in establishing clinical staffing committees for nurses in New York hospitals along with minimum nurse staffing standards in hospital intensive care units — wins nominators credit with fundamentally altering hospital accountability statewide. Her child advocacy work has been equally consequential: she helped raise the minimum age for juvenile detention from seven to twelve, expand access to child care, secure historic child care infrastructure investments, and pass legislation establishing New York's statewide supervised visitation program. She was also instrumental in the Child Poverty Reduction Campaign, which committed the state to a legally binding goal of cutting child poverty in half within ten years.

Colleagues describe Lemon as "a force to be reckoned with" who "gives her all for her clients," pairing frontline healthcare experience with legislative fluency and what one nominator called "a deep focus on the people the legislation she is lobbying for." One advocate who worked with her for six weeks put it simply: having dealt with other lobbyists, "she is far and away my favorite — and a star."