The NICE

Hey Everyone!

I am interning with a group called the NICE, which is full of nice people who do nice things... and the pun continues and never gets old :)

The NICE is short for the Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment. It is a young organization that is a hub of a national organization called Grand Aspirations. The NICE is just getting started as a nonprofit, and has been around for about three years. We do two things - community organizing and sustainability consulting, which are both continually growing and adapting depending on the year and who is involved. The community engagement part of the NICE was what it was founded as, and the consulting is just getting developed as a way to fund the other half. Basically, this is what happens, on an annual basis.

Every fall Nathan, the founder of the NICE, recruits people from the pool of youth climate activists he knows and has access to from the Northwest. People who are interested and agree get a small sum of money to gather a team and start a neighborhood enrichment program in a specific neighborhood in their city. This entails picking a neighborhood, talking to people within that neighborhood, and creating partnerships with local organizations and businesses. The team sets up a listening project in the neighborhood they choose. This includes going door-to-door within that neighborhood and asking people about their experience living in the neighborhood - what they like, what they don't like, what they want to change, and what barriers to making that change are. The conversation emphasizes environmentally sustainable change, but can also include topics such as neighborhood safety and schools as well. The team then asks the residents if they are interested in participating in a neighborhood enrichment program, and if they agree then they are invited to a neighborhood meeting. At the meeting, they meet their neighbors and share ideas of how to improve their neighborhood. The NICE teams role from here on out is mostly as facilitators. They help residents facilitate meetings, they share resources, and they are there to answer questions and to help out, but it is mostly the residents creating teams within their neighborhoods to put some of their dreams of improving their neighborhood into a reality. The program then becomes a self-sustaining program and the NICE team moves on to another neighborhood, while still offering support to the other one.

The second part of the NICE is just getting started, and that is the consulting part, and it is where I do most of my work. The consulting branch is meant to be how the NICE makes most of its money. Basically the purpose it to offer consulting to local organizations and businesses who are trying to improve the sustainability of their group, as well as to offer trainings on team development, leadership, campaign planning, and lots of other subjects geared towards leadership and environmental education. We are starting to develop curriculum, as well as to organize our first conference. Instead of us going to different groups and schools, this conference will offer an opportunity for interested people to come to us for one day of multiple different trainings. We hope to put on a conference about four times a year. We also work with groups to design specific trainings for their group.

My role in the NICE right now is kind of all over the place. I am currently on the team who is planning the first conference, as well as working with the individual neighborhood enrichment teams in various cities. I am also working with Nathan to develop a tool for the enrichment programs, called a challenge-in-a-box, which provides community members with everything they need to start their own team, if they get super excited about what is happening and want to get further involved. The challenge-in-a-box will allow them an opportunity to have everything that we have developed to launch a team, recruit people and create partnerships with organizations, and basically set up their own program in their neighborhood. This is really exciting because it will allow us to be able to assist a lot more people with programs because everything will already be there and ready to use.

I am really excited about this internship and the opportunity it gives me to work with the NICE, I have been involved for about a year now, but doing this internship allows me more time to work with them, which is awesome! I'm excited to see where this goes this Spring, and especially excited to see what happens with the first NICE conference we are planning!

Thanks for reading!

~Sarah