Nicole Gallant

Nicole Gallant (she/her) is the Founder & Principal of the Downie Street Collective, a consulting firm devoted to enabling leaders and their teams to drive and sustain social change. For nearly 25 years, her work has centered around race, gender, and economic justice. She has approached peacebuilding by working to understand and dismantle harmful structures that have perpetuated systemic racial, gender, and income inequality.

Nicole served as an appointee in President Obama’s Administration where she created the education strategy for the Serve America Act, using education as a pathway to opportunity for historically disadvantaged communities. At United Way of New York City, Nicole led the program and policy initiatives supporting hundreds of community-based organizations to increase the self-sufficiency and resiliency of low-income New Yorkers.

As a Programme Executive at the Atlantic Philanthropies, she created and managed a nationwide Learning portfolio committed to increasing education equity for children and youth from low-income communities across the United States. During her tenure, she created a portfolio of grants to diversify the leadership of the youth development sector. Those investments included innovative, intensive leadership training and coaching in structural racism to foster understanding of historical, cultural, and soci0-economic inequities among executive leaders. The outcome of the initiative opened up a pipeline for people of color as next-generation leaders of organizations supporting Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Native American youth from high poverty urban and rural communities. 

She holds an undergraduate degree in African American Studies, and a Master‘s Degree in Public Policy and Administration, both from Columbia University. Her work is published in the Journal of African-American History, and she is a proud AmeriCorps alum.