This is happening...

Dear friends, family, coworkers, and people who I don't remember meeting but I'm still Facebook friends with you:

After living 25 of my 26 years inside the beltway, I'm leaving the East Coast to start a new chapter of my life. Immediately after the election, I will join The Story of Stuff Project in Berkeley, CA, as their Director of Online Organizing and I'll be packing up the cats and taking them on a non-stop flight to SFO.

This decision is unexpected, scary, and exciting.

(Almost) everything I've ever known is in DC -- my family, my memories, my career, my life. It'll be a big transition.

But I can't wait to get started in San Francisco. I'm excited to live in a new timezone, to work in a really small office again, and to never having to deal with humidity ever again.

To those of you who, over the past year, I've said, "Let's grab a beer!" or "When are we catching up?" -- now is our time to do so. 

I'll miss you all and, remember, SFO is just one Virgin America nonstop flight away.

Love,

Nicole

Reflections on the healthcare ruling: part 2.

The other day I was asked to "describe Nicole in 140 characters." I wrote: 

Then: Counted coins for food + gas. Now: Taking down corrupt police chiefs w SMS campaigns. Always: committed to social justice & equality.

I'm regularly asked to describe my story, or why I was drawn to work on issues of social justice. This is essentially the short answer. The other part of the answer: my mom.

Mom's sacrifices and challenges have made me the social justicey, activisty, liberal nerd that I am. Realizing her struggle as I got older instilled a strong sense of what it meant to do the right thing. 

My mom divorced my dad when I was really young and was self-employed as a real estate agent in a rural community. We were really poor, yet my mom tried her hardest to make sure I never felt like we were doing without. 

I always had dinner, she always drove me 20 miles to and from school every day, and I was always taken care of even though I was sick a lot as a kid.

Why did I always have dinner? Because mom made sure I ate. She usually made one big caserole for herself and ate it all week while I had a different dinner every night.

Why did I get to skip the bus and get a ride to school? Because mom and I would count coins from her big coin jar to pay for gas when things were tight.

Why did I get the best care? Because mom made sure to get me to the doctor as soon as I had a sniffle. She never 'got sick' -- not because she was never ill, but because she had to take care of me over taking care of herself.

I found out later that my mom didn't have health insurance for 5 or 6 years while I was a child. All her time, money, and effort went into making sure I was taken care of, that there was nothing left to care for her.

After a few years, mom was able to get COBRA. Her monthly rate was between $400 and $600 making her, yet again, have to cut costs around the house.

But I never knew.

When the health care decision came down, I immediately thought of mom. Everything she sacrificed. All the money she spent just to keep insured after years of being uninsured.

• Soon, she'll have an affordable health care system she can buy into.
• Soon, she'll have health insurance that won't be able to discriminate against her. One that doesn't discriminate against people who are poor. Or work commission-based jobs. Or are women.
• Soon, she'll be able to fully focus on taking care of herself for the first time in her life -- a right and a benefit every mom deserves.

Congrats, mom. You deserve this.

Overcome with emotion.

I never blog. I never blog at work. I never blog about policy. But, right now, I'm doing all three.

I'm sitting at my desk at work completely overwhelmed with emotion and tearing up over the announcement that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act.

I don't have a precondition or cancer or any serious ailment, but I've had a rocky relationship with health care for the past few years.

I lost health insurance at the age of 22 when I no longer qualified to be on my dad's health insurance because I wasn't in school full time. I was working an hourly job at 39.5 hours a week while writing my thesis and prepping for graduation.

When I graduated 7 months later, I moved to New York where I found my first Grown Up job. I didn't have health insurance though because my company required that you be employed for 6 months before providng. 3 weeks after I became eligible, I was laid off. My insurance card came in the mail 2 weeks after my last day.

I moved back to DC a few months later and took a job at a nonprofit. Again, I had to wait several months before becoming insured. I reached the probationary period and realized I couldn't afford to be insured. My salary was so low, I couldn't afford the $200 a month rate and made the choice not to get insurance.

I was laid off again about 18 months ago in the winter and did everything I could to stop a cold as soon as I got the sniffles. If I felt sinus pressure or a tickle in my throat, I rushed to the pharmacy to get over the counter meds to stop any potential germs from becoming a full-blown cold. Sometimes I was successful, but other times I was out for a week at a time hoping my body would fix itself before I got pneumonia.

Now, at 26, I have reliable health insurance for the first time in 4 years. While I don't need help getting insurance anymore, I understand what it's like to no longer fear a sniffle or an earache. That relief is life changing and I'm so incredibly happy for the millions of Americans who won their lives back today.

How 2 nerds and 500 tacos took down 1 corrupt police chief.

On January 24, 2012, 4 police officers from East Haven, CT were arrested and indicted by the FBI on charges that they were abusing the immigrant community, and filing false reports to cover their crimes.

When East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo was asked by a local radio reporter what he would do to help the Latino community after decades of abuse. He (now-famously) said: "I might have tacos when I go home, I'm not quite sure yet."

My coworker and I heard about the story the next morning and, after feeling outraged, furious, and livid, we decided to turn anger into action. We thought: if the mayor wants to mock Latinos by joking about tacos, let's make him literally eat his words.

That morning, we embarked on a text-a-taco campaign to send the Mayor a message that racial insensitivity, especially in light of the abuses against this community, will not be tolerated. We started by uploading a simple graphic to Facebook to let people know what had happend and what they could do to show their outrage.

Within hours, we had more than 500 text messages and started contacting local restaurants to place this order.

Our partners on the ground agreed to deliver the tacos to the mayor and graciously held a press conference when they delivered the tacos the next day. Unfortunately, the Mayor caught wind of our delivery and wasn't there to receive the tacos. [Don't worry, the tacos weren't wasted on him. We left one on his desk and donated the rest to a local soup kitchen.]

(photo: New Haven Independent / Melissa Bailey)

Despite the delivery, the taco texts kept coming in. The campaign had more than 400 media mentions online and on television. Our campaign was also featured as The Daily GOOD and became a little nugget of popular culture.

But our work wasn't done.

On Thursday night, we were pleased with the response, but making a media spectacle wasn't our goal. We demanded that the institutional racism running rampant in East Haven be ended, and to do that, the man responsible must be held accountable.

We launched a Change.org petition Friday morning to get rid of Police Chief Joseph Gallo, the man who oversaw the department that trampled over the civil rights of immigrants and Latinos in that community for decades.

15,000 people signed the petition over the weekend putting increased pressure on the Mayor and the Police Chief. By Monday morning, the Police Chief was forced to retire.

This campaign couldn't have solved the issues East Haven, but by ousting the man behind intimidation of an entire community we were able to create space to talk about institutional racism and its impact on the town.

Updating Ye Olde Resume.

For the first time in my short career, it's been an entire year since I've updated my resume! This also means it's been nearly a year since I started my new job.

So, I decided to redesign my resume and make it match my blog... a little bit of personal branding.

This resume marks some pretty serious milestones for me: 

1. Lasting a year in a job for the first time since college. Due to the economy and misguided career choices, I wasn't able to stay in my first few jobs out of college for more than 10 months.
2. Being able to take internships off my resume for the first time. After my first job, I wound up doing a complete 180 in my career and took an amazing internship to jumpstart that new career. I'm grateful for that opportunity but happy that that part of my career is no longer represented on my resume.
3. Feeling truly happy and confident in my career. I do not have an easy job, nor do I have a job that I've mastered. For me, this is perfect. I thrive in situations where I can learn and grow and experiment and this is the first job where I've truly had all those opportunities.

I'm also going to use this as an opportunity to create a Living Resume board on Pinterest to document some of the fun things I've done in my career.

Do you have a Living Resume or have comments about my redesign? Please share below!