SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 4 2021 22 JACK CASSIDY NCLM Communications Associate Nicole Stewart Cannot Stop Creating New Leaders AT EVERY STOP ALONG HER CAREER, COUNCIL MEMBER NICOLE STEWART HAS FOUND HERSELF BOTH AS A LEADER AND AS A DEVELOPER OF FUTURE LEADERS. NOW, AS A FOREMOST VOICE FOR A NEW PERSPECTIVE IN RALEIGH, SHE’S IN THAT POSITION AGAIN. They don’t know how Nicole Stewart finds the time. As Raleigh’s Mayor Pro Tem, a mom of two, NC Conservation Network’s Development Director, board member for the N.C. League of Municipalities, and a participant in many other endeavors, they don’t know how she balances it all. It’s a refrain she hears often from colleagues and counterparts alike. “It’s kind of exhausting,” Stewart says, not of the work but of the question. “I always just answer quickly and say, ‘I don’t know.’” However she does it, she does it well. Stewart’s voice stands out. It stood out during her early career as an organizer, where issuebased motivations developed into political prowess, and it has stood out during her time on the Raleigh City Council, first as a dissenter and later as a foremost perspective among a new crop of perspectives. “With Nicole, we’re starting further down in the conversation,” said Megan Hinkle, policy analyst for Raleigh’s City Council office. “She does her homework.” From one project to the next—and often at the same time—Stewart has picked tasks that align with her goals, which can be broadly defined as equity. That notion informs the lot: her environmental passions, her climate objectives, her focus on affordable housing and schools and everything else, right down to the nitty-gritty work of ordinance making. At each stop, she’s created leaders in her wake. The result is even more voices, gathering momentum to face enormous challenges and guide the ever-changing Raleigh into its future. Stewart’s approach to her work is a combination of drive and know-how. The easy part is the drive. Moving from Connecticut to Apex at a young age, Stewart remembers her passion for environmental issues always being there, and she recalls a rich diversity throughout her upbringing as well in an area that was undergoing rapid change. “Diverse and quickly growing, and becoming even more diverse,” Stewart said of Apex. She followed those principles to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and after first considering marine biology, recognized that she would thrive more on the political side of the issue, rather than the hard sciences. She graduated with a degree in environmental studies, and almost immediately got a job back home in Wake County as an organizer for the NC Conservation Network. The know-how ripened from here. Stewart recalls one story in particular from her early days in the role where mega-landfills were slated to be built in eastern North Carolina, all in predominantly African American communities. The landfills would be used as an endpoint for trash shipped down from the Northeast. “They were literally dumping on these communities,” Stewart said. A few years into her organizing work at this point, Stewart was adept at planning and holding protests, and that is what she did. Stewart worked behind the scenes to coordinate with longtime criminal justice advocates and church leaders in the area, and helped coordinate messaging across the groups, while also bringing in outside organizations such as the Sierra Club and Coastal Federation. It was the community engagement portion that played the biggest part, Stewart believes, and ultimately, they were successful in stopping the project. “I do not kid myself in terms of how much those relationships with those African American leaders built me, built my view of diversity, equity, and inclusion… and shaped my young, 20-something-year-old naïve organizing self into who I would become,” she said. This period stands as a formative time in Stewart’s career. In 2008, she cofounded the Beehive Collective—a giving circle dedicated to creating women leaders that “pools money, time, and talent to impact our Raleigh community,” and has given more than $400,000 to local nonprofits since its launch, according to its website. Stewart and her friends were simply throwing fundraisers for fun before formalizing the organization. “We were pulling our collective resources. We all worked at either service industry or nonprofit jobs and didn’t make much, but we wanted to make a difference,” Stewart said. In the spirit of building new leaders, Stewart stepped off the Beehive board of directors after nearly five years. “If we’re serious about building new leaders, then the old ones have to get out of the way.” That approach to leadership would resurface later on the Raleigh City Council, but in the interim, Stewart remembers pouring her energies into both her work, where she was promoted to Development Director in 2011, and the small business community of the city through her husband, Les, who became the head brewer at Raleigh mainstay Trophy Brewing. She also had two children, Evan and Liza, now ages 12 and 9. Still, despite the litany of new responsibilities, the desire to get fully involved reached a breaking point. After tossing the idea of public office around with Les and members of the Beehive Collective for the better part of a year, Stewart took the plunge. “It was time to give back in a bigger way,” Stewart said.
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