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Nicole Lee

Ella Baker Center


With roots in the labor movement, Nicole is one of the Ella Baker Center’s senior most staff members. After four years of student organizing to defend affirmative action, Nicole became an organizer with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) Local 2850 in her hometown of Oakland. There, she helped launch EBASE (East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy), now one of the most powerful grassroots economic justice organizations in the Bay Area. Nicole also helped found the East Bay Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, an alliance of people of faith supporting worker organizing in the East Bay. In 2000, Nicole focused her efforts around the youth by taking the helm of Third Eye Movement’s Oakland chapter (now Silence the Violence). Nicole led Let’s Get Free through its first neighborhood-based campaign, a successful bid to remove a notoriously violent police officer from the streets of North Oakland. She helped steer the “Stop the Super-Jail” campaign to victory, preventing Alameda County from building one of the country’s largest juvenile halls (per capita). Later, as Books Not Bars’ lead organizer, she was key to the success of the ongoing campaign to close California’s massive, violent youth prisons with the type of small rehabilitation centers that have proven successful elsewhere. Now, with the Ella Baker Center growing and strengthening the ties between its campaigns, Nicole will be providing political direction for all of the organization’s programmatic work.