Center for Global Education and Experience

Nichole (she/her) is excited to be a part of the CGEE team, and in particular to work with the Customized Programs crew. You can reach out to her with questions about trips to Costa Rica and Cuba, and she’d be happy to connect you to the right person or information with general questions related to Customized Programs or any program CGEE has to offer.

Nichole first came into contact with CGEE in 2009 through her own semester abroad experience through CGEE’s program in Namibia and South Africa. Growing up in a rural farming community in Iowa, this trip was a first for many things, including seeing the ocean, as well as getting at the heart of so many concepts and ideas she’d begun to study at St. Olaf College in her Sociology and Anthropology degree. After college Nichole worked as an Americorps Member of the CTEP (Community Technology Empowerment Project) and also started what would become an on-going relationship with a local reproductive health and reproductive justice organization (Our Justice, formerly Pro-Choice Resources) in Minneapolis, Mn.

Her curiosity for learning and desire to live in Latin America eventually lead her first to Puno, Peru—a small city high up in the Andes—and then to some travels in Colombia and later to Mexico City, Mexico. She had the privilege of spending two years learning Spanish, teaching English, traveling, doing yoga, and dancing in these places, with the majority of the time spent in Mexico City. This is why she sounds most like a Chilanga when she speaks Spanish…

After returning to the U.S. in 2016, she continued working in the field of reproductive health and reproductive justice and also starting working part-time as an English and Spanish Community Interpreter. She has worked the last six years as an interpreter, and the last three years she worked as a full-time staff interpreter at North-Point Health & Wellness Center in North Minneapolis. Her time as an interpreter not only taught her so much about language and the cultures that create and shape the languages we use, but also gave her an intimate view into the lives of many Latinx immigrants living, working, and receiving (or not receiving) healthcare here in the U.S. She is so grateful to the patients, clients and providers who let her be a witness to vulnerability, humility and humanity, in it’s most challenging and beautiful forms.

Outside of this position, Nichole is a dancer, mover, yoga teacher and somatics enthusiast. She is a cyclist commuter (though a selective winter biker), a plant parent, queer, and that farmgirl from Iowa who still likes to walk barefoot and dig her hands into the Earth. She does her best to continue the practices of self-care, radical healing, anti-racism, embodied social justice, and supporting Mother Earth to carry out her natural, essential cycles. Nichole is also an auntie to three beautiful children who are the sweetest people she has ever met.