WHO WE ARE
Meet Nico
I am a collectivist at heart. I believe deeply in the power of the collective, of bringing our individual gifts together in service of something bigger than ourselves.
My approach to the world was nurtured in the Polish and South Asian communities in Chicago that raised me up – as a Chicago Public School graduate, and as a first-gen college student. From writing my one-woman skit on Saul Alinsky and the roots of community organizing, to my immersion in liberation theology and life-giving spiritualism – I believe we can have the health, vitality and love we are here to build in this lifetime.
As a young person, I left Chicago to travel the streets of Tijuana, Paris, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., organizing with immigrant communities and asking how we/they could build power for what they wanted in the world. I was grateful to have the opportunities to build local, state and federal campaigns for immigration reform, organize marches and legislative change and community forums, pioneer national cell phone and online organizing training, and establish lasting movement organizing infrastructure.
After 10 years of organizing, I was drawn to support our movements in a new way: helping leaders take their big ideas and learn how to put them into action. I founded Up With Community in 2013, creating spaces for people to lay out their ideas, their dreams, their hopes and build the skills, practices and awareness to achieve them.
My professional work is nourished and supported by my community-based spirituality and art practice. I live in Lewiston, my heart’s home. In this community I have found a healthier relationship to my body and to the earth, as well as communal bonds across class, culture, and generations. My kids, my husband, and my chosen family inspire me in the work, and keep me going through the challenging times. My communal art project, Sea Free, helps me bring the spiritual and soulful connections of life into the services I provide through Up With Community. Through it all, I am learning more each day about love – the deep investment in the spiritual growth of ourselves and each other – how to love myself, others, and this world as it is and as it can be one day soon.
GRATITUDE
Up With Community is being built through multi-year relationships with partners locally and across the country.
We’d like to acknowledge the power and love of everyone who helps us strengthen this practice. Here, we thank:
– Ben, Anjali, Rajan
– Carol Wishcamper, Cathy Kidman, Erik Peterson, Craig White, and Sage Hayes
– Elif Demircan and Max Mogensen at Fabric Portland
– Sue Pollock, Ashley Mills, Leah Hurley and Chelsea Canedy
– Meghan Lambert and Sam Ho
– Gita Gulati-Partee; Robert Gass and the Rockwood Leadership Institute Team; George Goehl, Son Ah Yun, Rich Stolz, DuShaw Hockett and the Community Change/ FIRM teams; Dr. Barbara Love PhD; Damien Azali-Rojas, Sarah Jawaid, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Alison Lin, and the Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation Team.
– Our Lewiston, Maine community – our heart’s home
And, to all our coach partners – past, present and future: we are grateful to be learning through weaving together.
OUR STORY
Up With Community was born a little over 10 years ago, after I had spent over a decade in community organizing.
I was working for social justice and community change groups that I loved and trusted and was inspired by, yet found us falling short of our goals to create deep and lasting change. So I took a step back and I wondered, what do our movements need that I can offer and help with?
I looked out into the world and I saw there were a few different kinds of coaches doing the type of work I was drawn to. Organizations were hiring strategic planning coaches, organizational development coaches, and DEI trainers. And each of these folks would come into the organizations and do their thing. They’d give their best advice, their best thoughts about human resources, about creating strategic plans, or cultivating diversity, equity and inclusion. But nothing got meaningfully integrated at the team level and nothing really shied.
Teams were left in the middle trying to figure out on their own what to do with all these different inputs. Some things had changed around the edges but the core barriers holding back our movements were still there.
So when I started Up With Community, it was built on a specific vision for how to help teams. To coach the collective instead of coaching individuals, and to weave in an interdisciplinary approach, getting folks out of their silos. I believe liberation is possible in our lifetime, and I believe in the ability of teams to build freedom, piece by piece, day by day.