Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Lillie.
Hi Nicole, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grew up in Fontana, CA. My father works for a credit union and my mother is a teacher, they both taught me from a very early age the importance of looking out for community and doing what we can for those in our own backyard. Volunteering, from school, Rotary Interact, National Honor Society, and any opportunity that came my way I worked to serve my community. I always enjoyed school and learning, but getting to be in my community and learning more about their needs and getting to help is where I found purpose.
Growing up, having relatives with behavioral health conditions taught me firsthand how poorly our local government and systems were serving our most impacted neighbors. I also watched my mother pay out of pocket for new school supplies every year for her kindergarten classes because the school had insufficient resources to do it themselves. Paired with my interest in service and politics I became very involved in civic education, especially on the local level. Our local governments control most of the day-to-day issues that impact us all most. So much related housing, cost of living, and health, are all handled by our city and county. Our local governments need more lived-expertise informed policy and our neighbors need to get more involved in the systems that rule our lives. In my junior year of high school I worked with my classmates to plan a peer-led voter registration drive and presentation. Our first year we presented to every social studies class and [pre-] registered over 300 students. In this presentation we emphasized the importance of local elections and down ballot races. We continued the effort the following year virtually due to COVID 19, and brought younger students in to ensure the continuation of the drive. I also participated in a youth council with the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors my final years of high school.
When it came time for college, I selected UC San Diego, Marshall College due to its focus on social justice, community, and service. It was here that I met my closest friend in San Diego, Yvania Rubio, who brought me into the powerful youth-led work being done at Our Time To Act (OTTA). I initially joined for the Youth Voter Engagement project where we engaged over 5,000 youth in the 2022 Fall Quarter through youth-designed events. These included events like “Paws-itively Ready for the Polls,” with therapy dogs to draw students into conversations about voter registration and “Boba and Ballots” where we passed out boba while speaking to students about ballot propositions and ensuring they registered 15 days ahead of the quickly approaching election. We also held a candidate forum on UCSD’s campus with now Council President Pro Temp Kent Lee and Superior Court Judge Rebecca Kanter. Bringing candidates in local races directly to youth to answer the questions most urgent to them. Many of the issues driving my peers and I to the polls related to housing and cost of living.
Following this first project, I stayed on with Our Time To Act as Director of Housing Justice. Since then, our work has shifted to focus immensely on organizing powerful youth for an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future in housing. For the past 3 years I have learned so much about the structural policies that control our housing and land-use in San Diego. I have worked with youth at all levels of housing stability, and identified strengths and failures of our region’s service system. In July 2024, I had the honor of becoming the first full-time staff and Executive Director of Our Time To Act. Just as I found purpose in volunteering and community service early on, I now find so much gratitude and joy in the work I get to do with OTTA. The mission of organizing my fellow youth, eliminating segregation, ending youth homelessness, and achieving housing justice drive me personally everyday. I feel incredibly lucky to get to do this work with my incredible colleagues and the many community partners that have become family in San Diego.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It hasn’t always been a smooth road. Becoming an Executive Director at 21 does not come without challenges. As an entirely youth led-organization we have had a lot to learn, but we also have the benefit of an incredible capacity for learning and seemingly unlimited creativity. We have had incredible mentors along the way, but we have also had to learn many things ourselves. Some skills only come with time and effort. Running a youth-led organization also means youth schedules. Many of us were, and are students. There are countless memories of late night strategy meetings, grant writing, and event planning. Running between City Hall and campus while cramming studying and homework in on bus trips. I have no idea where we find the time and energy to get it all done, and there are definitely days that are more difficult than others. Changemaking work for youth means fighting the systemic problems at the same time as working harder to prove you belong at the table. Every young person with the courage to shape our own futures in the present has made countless untold sacrifices. The world is not built for our participation, and the adults are not always prepared to share power. You get thrown into the deep end, but the good news is there are lots of people there with you helping to teach you how to swim.
Funding is also always a major challenge. Sustainable financial support is difficult for any newer nonprofit, especially when your nonprofit is run by 16 to 24 year olds. Our Time To Act is now over 8 years old, and we will continue to pass the trailblazing torch of youth leadership on to each new generation of young leaders. Our motto is youth own the future, we’re shaping it now. We hear a lot about investing in the future, and we have been lucky to find incredible funders who invest in the future youth are shaping at Our Time To Act. We hope to continue finding youth allies and building sustainable financial support for our work.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I shared a bit in the initial question on my story, but I specialize in housing organizing and advocacy. Our organization is focused on achieving housing justice through eliminating exclusionary zoning, enacting housing solutions, and ending youth homelessness. If you ask my friends they will tell you, I eat, sleep, and breathe housing. I have been interested in housing solutions since high school when I attended meetings on housing services in San Bernardino, but it wasn’t until January 2023 when I began truly digging into the policies that control it. We began first by understanding how housing and land use decisions were even decided. Our Time To Act participated in the University City Community Plan Update process. I sat at University City High School month after month for meetings with my neighbors. There we learned how the groups worked, and how land-use was designed and designated. Unfortunately we also learned how much exclusion and cruel behavior there was against students, youth, and renters from older white residents. Students were called a “plague” on University City, and told that our opinions did not matter as much as those of “long-term residents”. I found this extremely frustrating, as youth and renters opinions are just as important as anyone else’s. We are trying to plan for a future where everyone has stable housing and can become long-term residents of the places we call home. It was additionally frustrating to hear people who moved to a place called “University” City complain about the presence and consideration of students in their neighborhoods.
From this experience we began to look deeper into the policies that dictated the limitations hampering potential housing solutions. For this we had to look not just citywide, but at policies historically implemented to segregate neighborhoods all over the country. From partners like Ricardo Flores at LISC San Diego, we were introduced to the intention behind policy distinctions like single-unit vs. multi-unit residential zoning. As someone who has long studied the history of voting rights in this country I was aware of the ways racialized disenfranchisement continued long beyond the adoption of the 15th amendment. Just as racists had used non-racially-explicit forms of discrimination then, with literacy tests and grandfather clauses, so did city planners with new zoning restrictions. Zoning laws like single-unit only residential zones, and minimum lot size requirements were created to artificially raise the cost of housing and pull homeownership further and further out of reach. These policies, implemented as more racially-explicit forms of segregation and housing discrimination were outlawed, preserved and expanded the gap in housing access and generational wealth growth disproportionately for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and low-income residents all over the country. Unlike literacy tests and grandfather clauses though, these laws are still on the books, including here in San Diego. In order to have meaningful progress in creating solutions for the future of housing in San Diego, we must first eliminate these exclusionary restrictions in our zoning and land-use codes.
Our work goes beyond removing harmful policy, we have also worked hard to organize around solutions like the recent ban on algorithmic price fixing of rents and many housing reforms that encourage greater development near public transit. Housing is an incredibly intersectional issue, and naturally so is our work. All of our residents most basic needs, housing, food, health, cost of living, must be met in order for our city to be successful. Understanding the ways in which local government operates and moves is absolutely essential for youth and our most impacted neighbors to claim power. While our policy work is moving towards achieving that future, it takes a long time, and youth are experiencing the ever-growing housing crisis right now. I have the honor of serving as one of the co-chairs of the San Diego Youth Homelessness Consortium (SDYHC) and through our partnerships we are able to refer and connect youth to available resources and services provided by the incredible youth-serving members of the SDYHC. In this role, OTTA also contributes feedback on authentic and best practices for youth engagement and pushes for greater inclusion of and power sharing with youth with lived-expertise in system-level decision-making.
What sets OTTA apart from others is also what I am most proud of. As a youth-led organization we have the freedom and personal expertise to truly meet youth where they are at. When it came to the Youth Voter Engagement project, I had spent my whole first year watching folks with clipboards around campus be entirely ignored by the student body. On the other hand, my peers and I flooded events with therapy dogs and free food (especially boba). We utilized this expertise to create programming that would actually engage youth in the complicated topics in a way that is accessible to them. By inviting therapy dogs onto campus for “Paws-itively Ready for the Polls” every Friday, I was able to engage youth at all levels of knowledge on politics. We didn’t just reach students who were studying political science, or already knew who they were voting for. We spoke to everyone from fourth-years who’d never registered to vote, to first-years who didn’t yet know that the address they were registered to impacted what would be on the ballot they received. We also engaged adults on campus who often admitted to learning something new from us “young people,” because when it comes down to it everyone craves a little youthful joy and being met where they are in their learning journey. We have continued to find fun and creative ways to teach youth and our allies about the complicated housing topics that make and break our region. Youth have built their dream neighborhood out of Legos while discussing land-use code updates, and learned about organizing over dumpling making. Our most recent event series, “Policy Over..” has included zoning policy conversations over homemade pasta, coffee and pastries, and in the spooky spirit, “Policy Over Pumpkins.”
Shaping our future doesn’t need to be overly complicated, and it doesn’t need to be boring. I am proud that we have been able to infuse so much joy into the difficult work of changemaking, and I am even more proud of the energetic and youthful community that keeps showing up and fighting for housing justice no matter how many challenges arise in our path.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
The three most important things/pieces of advice I have for finding a mentor are as follows:
1) Find someone who is value aligned, that you respect and trust and who respects and trusts you.
2) Find someone you can challenge directly (and respectfully) without worrying that it will harm the relationship.
3) Be comfortable being challenged yourself, always be ready and willing to learn. Don’t set an expectation for how your mentor should act, look, or even how old they might be.
My best and favorite mentors are all incredibly different, and yet all have these three things in common. I feel incredible respect and trust for them and feel that reciprocated. I know I can challenge something they tell me or that they do, and vice versa, and feel certain that it will lead to an honest conversation that helps both of us grow. Not all of my mentors are older than me, and some are in very different fields but I always walk away from interactions and conversations with them having learned something new or expanded my perspective and understanding. As for advice in finding these mentors, you have to be willing to put yourself out there and to be yourself. Do not try and mimic what you think “professionalism” or the “right way” to network is. Be yourself, and to share the advice of one of my mentors, don’t feel pressure to show or tell someone everything in your first interaction. Trust that there will be another conversation, another question. Allow curiosity and be sure that you are getting to know one another, just as you want to find your mentor, you want to make sure that mentor is the right fit for you.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ourtimetoact.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ottaunited/
- Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/ourtimetoact.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-lillie-02911b268
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3W2KhhfuWOcoqDtiEWudEw/featured
- Other: https://www.ourtimetoact.org/eliminating-exclusionary-zoning
