Nicole Lee is the founding Executive Director of Urban Peace Movement (UPM), a grassroots racial justice organization in Oakland, CA. UPM builds youth leadership to transform the social conditions that drive community violence and mass incarceration. Nicole has been an organizer for more than 25 years – since she was a college student – leading critical social justice work through coalition-building and youth organizing campaigns. She is proud to be a fourth-generation Oaklander. Her father’s side of the family came to Oakland from China in the 1880s. Her mom’s family, also from China, came to Oakland via the Fiji Islands and the Hawaiian Islands, so her roots extend there as well. Nicole has received many awards and recognitions for her work. She was named on EBONY Magazine's prestigious Power 100 List as a “Community Crusader” in 2018. In 2022 she received the Rosenberg Foundation's Leading Edge Fellowship, and most recently, in 2023 she was inducted into the Bay Area Hip Hop Archives.
Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Nicole was deeply influenced by hip hop music and culture. In fact, she traces her involvement in social justice work to her love of hip hop. She tells me about saving up the money to buy her first record – a 45 – when she was just seven or eight years old. “Hip hop music has been around me my entire life,” she says. “I can't remember my life without it. In the 90s, hip hop came under fire, particularly on the West Coast. It was called ‘gangster rap’ by the mainstream media, but it was actually very political music. It was politicizing people, and giving young people in particular a bigger view of what was happening in our world. So that was really the thing that made me first start to think about these issues.”
Nicole tells me about her involvement in student organizing against Proposition 209, a 1996 California ballot initiative that ended state affirmative action programs in education, public employment, and government contracting. “After that,” she points out, “is when they really started to roll out mass incarceration. There were these horrible narratives characterizing young people of color as monsters and criminals, and calling them ‘super predators.’ So we began organizing around that. I was part of the movement against Proposition 21, which was a youth crime bill that passed in 2000, making it easier for prosecutors to move young people directly into adult court without having to go through a judge.” Part of that organizing was done in her role as Political Director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, under the leadership of Van Jones. While there, she co-founded an initiative called Silence the Violence, enlisting Bay Area youth and residents, elected officials, celebrities, and local radio in an anti-violence effort. She also co-founded a project called Turf Unity that brought together Oakland rappers from areas with historic rivalries to use hip hop music to quell community violence. Then in 2009, she launched Urban Peace Movement.
“At UPM,” Nicole explains, “we fight for a world in which young people are viewed as sacred, and invested in as such. A world where our communities of color are supported, and treated with kindness and dignity, and allowed to thrive. That’s the world I envision, and that's the world we're fighting for. So our work is really in line with what I have been doing since I was a teenager.”
After so many years of movement work, I’m curious about how Nicole defines activism. She pauses for a moment before responding. “Yeah, that’s a difficult question. I see myself, first and foremost, as a community organizer. I think activism is a complex word. On one hand, it makes me think of people who are willing to put their lives, their bodies, their principles on the line for something – for a set of values, for a vision for a different kind of world. That’s really inspiring, and resonates with me as someone who does this work. But I also think that sometimes the word activist can be associated with being reactionary, and jumping out to respond to something that you don't agree with. I think there can be a negative connotation to the word activism, because among folks who do this work, such as myself, we don't think of ourselves as simply being defensive or being reactionary. Many of us prefer to think of ourselves as community organizers, because organizing is a discipline, you know, it's a craft. And the craft involves listening to community, being with community, building networks and relationships, and building the leadership of other people, rather than putting yourself at the center of the work.”
I ask Nicole what comes up for her when she hears the title of this blog, “Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism.” The word that stands out to her most is frontline. “It connotes an idea that there's a battle and that we're on the frontlines of that battle,” she says. “And I do think that’s a big part of what it means to be an organizer or an activist. As much as we do this work out of a sense of love and a desire to build community, there’s a dimension of it that’s about trying to defend our communities from interests that that don't take our well-being to heart. It requires a level of fortitude, and that's why healing has to be part of what it means to do this work.”
I have known Nicole since her days leading Silence the Violence at the Ella Baker Center, and watched her grow in both her own healing practice, and in placing an explicit focus on healing more and more at the center of her work at Urban Peace Movement. In addition to their youth leadership programs, they hold healing circles for families impacted by lethal community violence. (I have been honored to hold healing space for their staff and interns when they were grieving the deaths of their own colleagues or constituents.) UPM also hosts large-scale events, both as an organizing strategy and as a way to provide direct healing experiences to the communities they serve. One of their signature programs is Scratch & Fade.
Nicole describes it to me, “We offer free manicures and fresh haircuts [as a way to bring people in]. And then we curate a set of wellness services around those things, and offer those to the community too. Things like reiki, acupuncture, massage therapy, and mini talk therapy sessions. In the past, we've had elder blessings. We had a journaling station where people can decorate their own journal. We had a station where people could write a positive affirmation to themselves and put it in a box, and then we will mail that affirmation out to them, so that in a couple of weeks, they'll get a reminder of how amazing they are – from themselves! We want people at our events to feel a sense of dignity. And we hope that people walk away feeling that they were honored and valued and loved and praised. Because that's what people in our community deserve.”
I’m deeply moved by the healing that Nicole’s work brings to the community, and I’m curious how she has experienced healing in her own life in the context of her activism. In response, she talks about her belief that activism and organizing are really about building Beloved Community, and the realization that none of us can do it alone. She confesses that's something she still struggles with. “Because I grew up in a context in which I was on my own a lot, it became one of my default narratives. Feeling like it's all on me, and no one has my back. I've just got to figure this out and power through it. Thug it out, you know what I mean? Like Tupac’s song: ‘Me Against the World.’ But when you do community organizing, you're forced to realize you can't do it on your own. There's no way that one person is going to transform society, it just can't happen. By definition, in its nature, it has to happen at the level of community. And I think that is, in and of itself, healing in a way. It becomes a practice.”
Nicole continues, “One of the things that I've learned over time is that my activism is my practice. You know, just like walking can be a practice, right? I think I learned that from a teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center. I used to go there years ago; there was a teacher named Spring Washam. One time I went to a day-long retreat she led, and she had us do a walking meditation outside. We looked really weird doing that in the middle of downtown Oakland. Passers-by were like, what's wrong with these people? Are they in a cult? Are they zombies? You feel very self-conscious. And I was doing it: walking around downtown Oakland in my meditation, doing mindful walking. And then I witnessed something really intense happen – a domestic violence occurrence. I couldn't just keep walking, so I stopped and I said something. I checked on the woman who I saw had just been harmed. And she seemed to be okay, in that moment, and safe.
“I went back to the meditation center after that, and I said that I couldn't finish my walking meditation because this thing happened right in front of me, and I couldn't just keep walking. And Spring said, you know, that was a meditation.” Nicole’s voice quavers. “Sorry, it makes me want to cry, thinking about that. She said, that was part of your meditation; intervening in that situation was part of your meditation. And that moment taught me that our activism is part of our practice. They're inseparable, and the things that we're intervening on – these horrific things that are happening in our community, that activists feel motivated to jump in front of sometimes – that is part of our practice. It’s not that we practice and then we become activists later. Activism is part of our practice. It's part of our healing. It's part of our teaching.”
Another example she offers is how many of us who do this work came to it out of a feeling of voicelessness. “For whatever reason, we felt like we couldn't speak up for ourselves. I think some of us still feel that way in certain areas of our lives. We put up with things, or we were silenced for whatever reason. We didn't feel safe enough to say, ‘I don't like that,’ or ‘I don't deserve that,’ you know? And somehow, we found our voices through activism. At first, maybe we did it for someone else. We said, ‘She doesn't deserve that. They don't deserve that. Our community doesn't deserve that.’ But I think in the process of doing that, you also begin to build up the courage to say: ‘You know what, I don't deserve that either. And I'm part of the collective we.’ For me, that has definitely been the case. And that has been, I think, one of the most direct ways that this work has contributed to my healing.”
Reflecting on the significance of all Nicole has shared, I ask how we can bring what she’s learned about healing in the midst of activism forward more in our work, both individually and collectively. She suggests the most important thing is that all of us have to be engaged in healing work ourselves. Without that direct personal experience, there’s no way we can hold space for somebody else. “Healing work is generative,” she points out. “You're actually generating like a field around you, an energetic field. And it has to come from a place of your own deep practice.”
Nicole sees healing and justice as symbiotic. For her, justice is both the starting point and the destination. She talks about how we may enter activism because we don’t like what’s happening in the world or in our community, and we want something better. She sees healing as key to realizing those new possibilities. “I think when we do healing, it creates the space for us to be visionary. And to be hopeful. Then once you start doing activism, you realize it's hard work. It's exhausting. I have never worked so hard in my entire life as I'm working right now. And I've been doing this for almost 30 years, nonstop. So, you also need healing to sustain yourself in the activism as well.”
Nicole recounts a pivotal moment in her own development – meeting Ericka Huggins for the first time. Ericka is a human rights activist, poet, educator, Black Panther Party leader and former political prisoner. She was incarcerated for two years awaiting trial, before the charges were dropped, and spent time in solitary confinement. Ericka taught herself to meditate as a way to survive incarceration, and for the past several decades her work has centered the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change.
“When I met her,” Nicole recalls, “I was maybe 22 years old. I had met other activists from the 60s and 70s. And most of them, honestly, were bitter. They were burnt out and resentful. Rightfully so, you know. They had been through the wringer. And I remember sitting down with a group of other young people, and Ericka was addressing us. The first thing she said is you need to take care of yourself. It was the kindest thing I had ever heard from an activist at that time. It was so simple, and yet profound. And it was maybe the greatest teaching that I've ever had from an elder activist. I hope that I can impart that lesson – Ericka’s lesson – to young people that I work with now, and moving forward. I think knowing that people value you enough to tell you that you're important and that you need to take care of yourself – that you deserve that – is the most powerful lesson that we can share with people coming into this work.”
Nicole loves seeing the young people she works with find their own voice. She explains, “When many of them start out, they're meek and nervous. They can barely talk in a meeting, let alone get on a microphone and give a speech. And then a year later, they're fired up and grabbing the mic, self-confident in a way that’s mind blowing. Just watching that process and being inspired by that, is the thing that sustains me. That and also watching them build friendships that will probably be lifelong relationships for them. There are people that I met when I was a young activist in my late teens and early 20s that will be friends of mine for the rest of my life.”
I ask about what specific practices she has found most helpful, and she talks about how they have integrated healing into the culture of her organization. “It's a lot of things,” she says. “Meditation is really helpful. Especially when we can do those things together as a staff, that's been really awesome. We have brought a healer in now. Reverend Liza, you've come in to do that for us, too. We do at least one or two workshops with our staff annually. We also now stipend our staff $1,000 a year, on top of their salary, to support their healing work. That might be somatic practice, or taking yoga classes, or martial arts. It could even be to purchase a bunch of massage gift certificates for themselves. So yeah, those are all the things that I do also. I think you have to have a whole menu of things to sustain you.”
As we near the end of our time together, I ask about the vision Nicole is working toward. She doesn’t hesitate, “I want to see a wholly different kind of society. Because the paradigm that we're in right now – living under this capitalist, patriarchal, heterosexist, greedy, individualistic society – is not actually yielding a good quality of life for most Americans. It's not. I want a world that is rich in culture and authenticity. You know, the parts of Oakland that I love. Where people are edgy, and creative, and come up with things that don't exist anywhere else in the country. I think about Oakland slang, Oakland's music, the way people in Oakland dress. The weird way that culture is all mixed up and we influence one another, that we learn from each other's cultures and histories. And it's messy, and it's complicated. I want to keep all of those things. And I think we need to live in a world where, when people have a kid, they can take six months off and still pay their rent and be supported. Where elders are taken care of with dignity. And we have free health care. So, yeah, a care-based society where people's basic needs are taken care of without question. That's what we deserve.”
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To learn more about Nicole’s work visit:
Urban Peace Movement: www.urbanpeacemovement.org
Nicole’s 2016 article “Street Knowledge: Power for Positive Change” in Race, Poverty & the Environment (Vol 20-2) available online: https://www.reimaginerpe.org/20-1/lee
UPM promo video:
Much respect to Nicole for your longevity as an activist and for incorporating the wisdom of Erika Huggins into your way of being.