Nicolle's Resume

Oversee an ambitious effort to advance the organization’s educational justice and equity agenda to drive impact via earned and social media, events, and partnership efforts. Lead communications to disseminate Ed Trust’s messages to a wide variety of stakeholders, including policymakers, practitioners, advocates, parents and caregivers, and students. Develop and implement effective communications/outreach plans to advance policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the American education system. Ensure consistency and quality control of all external information. Track, monitor, and report on the effectiveness of communications. Led the organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Provide strategic communications counsel to senior leadership, including former U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. and former president Kati Haycock, and partner organizations. Grant Writing. Produce Ed Trust’s quarterly report for our board, funders, and new and potential hires. Have five direct reports and help manage a team of 11 communications professionals, and multiple communications and event firms.

Accomplishments

• Lead a multiyear advocacy campaign to raise the voices of Black student borrowers burdened by student debt. My team’s efforts helped change the narrative in the media about who is most saddled by $1.7 trillion in student loan debt when it was widely reported that Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order on debt cancelation.    

• Direct a communications team that regularly earns more than 400 news articles each quarter across multiple Ed Trust portfolios.

• Oversaw a multipronged campaign showing how discipline policies disproportionately impact Black girls, which was the cornerstone of an influential New York Times front-page story, “A Battle for the Souls of Black Girls.” I also created and produced an event on the criminalization of Black youth with New York Times education writer Erica L. Green and Kristin Henning, author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, which honed in on what can be done to ensure that in-school and out-of-school environments are safer for Black kids. Our efforts were instrumental in securing a letter from the U.S. Department of Education seeking to end corporal punishment. And our communications push also helped Ed Trust's Government Affairs team press for mental health investments secured in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

• Led the redesign of Ed Trust’s website, www.EdTrust.org, by launching a request for proposal, running a competitive vendor selection process, and gaining consensus for the direction of the website across the organization’s four major divisions and three state offices.

• Positioned an entirely new higher education team as experts in traditional media by conducting multiple media trainings, finding speaking engagements at key convenings, and scheduling face-to-face meetings with reporters from national and trade media publications. As a result, our spokespeople are regularly quoted in top-tier publications, including CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher, the Atlantic, among many others.

• Lectured at the Education Writers Association, EdTrust Bootcamps, Howard University’s, and Morgan State University’s Advanced Public Relations class on creating an impactful outreach strategy to press for change.