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Nicole ValentinoNicole is a bridge builder and a healer. She builds (metaphorical) bridges in the service of the beloved community. For over three decades, she has used her mental health clinical training along with her social justice activism and advocacy work, to serve communities suffering from trauma resulting from systemic oppression in inner city communities in Los Angeles and the SF Bay Area. Today she works and shares her wisdom and her enduring humor and joy with these same communities, in the role of a professional Life Coach.
Nicole was attracted to Creative Freedoms Movements because she shares the commitment to intentional cultivation of joy and justice that can be created, discovered and cultivated in beloved community. She values reciprocity as a practice, and gives back to the individuals and communities that have given so much to her. Nicole believes in innate goodness. She seeks it, she advocates for it and she nurtures it. She is a healer, a teacher and a student. She is a truth seeker and a truth teller. She is a freedom fighter and a lover. She is a listener and a storyteller. She is a highly sensitive person and a fierce badass. She is a devoted spouse, parent and grandparent. She is a social justice activist and a practitioner of loving kindness practice. She is a two-spirit being in human be-ing training. Nicole has spent her life healing herself and others. She studied Psychology and Women’s Studies at CSULA in Los Angeles and JFKU in Orinda, CA. She trained as a mental health clinician, and dedicated decades as a provider of mental health services to people of all ages, nurturing the minds and spirits of the often invisible, ignored and discounted walking wounded - survivors of trauma resulting from multiple forms of abuse and sanctioned oppression. In the last several years, Nicole has honed her skills as a dynamic strategic planner and organizational project manager. She mastered creative strength-based problem solving in the workplace in local government and the private sector. She effectively combined years of formal training, practical knowledge and hands on experience with political campaign management, and developed a unique expertise in team and coalition building. She was able to incorporate some of these skills in her work as Community Advocate and Chief of Staff to former Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. She has also worked in a variety of volunteer advocacy positions in support of several Richmond-based non-profit community serving organizations, including RYSE, Y.E.S., BBK, Urban Tilth, Safe Return Project, Richmond Progressive Alliance, and Saffron Strand. Today, Nicole focuses her energy and attention primarily on her love of healing the whole being, in her work as a Life Coach. She experiences great joy in assisting people to connect, discover and rediscover the waiting and wanting to emerge parts of themselves, including parts that may have been wounded, forgotten or are yet to be discovered. She is fortunate to be able to do this in the service of the beloved community, by working with individuals who seek connection from within as well as from without. In her role as Life Coach, Nicole works with private clients as well as with non-profit organizations that serve the the formerly incarcerated, artists, activists, house-less, politicians, union leaders, teachers and filmmakers. She enjoys connecting the dots, be they in the form of people, places, ideas or things. She trusts that the connections lead to transformations into something symbiotic, new and better. Sometimes she is fortunate enough to witness what develops from the connections. Nicole is a Bay Area transplant and a native Angeleno. Her indigenous roots are on the continents of Africa, North America and Central America. She embraces the intersections of her ethnic, cultural, experiential, conditioned and ever evolving eclectic make up. Nicole also identifies as a creative person. An artist and a writer. The short QWOCMAP film she collaborated on with a friend and her wife, De Colores, explores the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Her latest creative inspiration is a thematic blog that she expects to publish in 2020. |