Nicole has been a member of the ERASE Racism team for four years and already had a firm foundation in racial equity when she joined us, having held internships with two non-profit organizations serving students from low-income families and having co-founded a tuition-free summer reading and writing program. She began as a volunteer at ERASE Racism before joining the staff five months later. At ERASE Racism, she has been immersed in addressing structural racism on Long Island and its intersection with housing and public-school education. She became the lead trainer for ERASE Racism on this topic for school and college educators, business professionals, community members, and high school and university students.
Throughout her work at ERASE Racism, Nicole has consistently demonstrated her program- planning and implementation skills, event coordination, and fundraising. She has worked in research-informed settings, applying the research for programmatic and policy advocacy activities. With her breadth of experience, she is now focused on making the Inclusive Housing Initiative programmatically and financially sustainable.
Nicole is a graduate of the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY Brooklyn, where she earned Bachelor's degrees in English and Physics. In college, she held internships with Collegespring, an organization that provides free test preparation to students, and Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools, a six-week, no-cost summer literacy program.
Through those experiences, she understood more concretely the impact of structural racism and her role in the struggle to end it. Returning to Long Island after graduating in 2019, she dedicated her attention and energy to supporting community activism where she grew up.
While working part-time, Nicole organized meetings with fellow activists to write letters to political prisoners, volunteered with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and became a member of South Huntington Union Free School District’s Education Equity Initiative. Those efforts, combined with her work experience, solidified the urgency of social justice efforts on Long Island. In June 2020, Nicole co-founded a tuition-free summer reading and writing program in partnership with a not-for-profit, Tri-CYA, called Pages for Perspectives. The program was aimed at bridging the achievement gap locally and providing accessible summer engagement to young people in her community.
Nicole gained further insights from working as a user-experience recruiter for The New York Times by day and a line cook by night. With the Times, she fully understood the importance of having historically marginalized voices represented in media research. Her job was to collect these voices to give user-feedback and help the Times build products and generate news that would serve all people. Being an hourly-wage line cook, who could not afford her entree at the restaurant where she worked, concretized the wealth gap and the impossibility of sustaining a high quality of life on Long Island in a minimum-wage job.
Recognizing how bound up the wealth gap is with structural racism, Nicole ultimately left restaurant kitchens to immerse herself in local efforts to desegregate Long Island.
