Peralta’s Board of Trustees is now a model of respectful and principled representation of the public interest. In 2023 Nicky spear-headed the successful vacancy appointment to the Peralta Board of Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, a committed parent who comes to us with a decade of experience protecting and advancing the rights of students with disabilities, who was co-President of the Alliance for Parents and Teachers at Oakland School for the Arts, who fought for working families for more than a decade as the statewide communications director for UNITE here, and now leads a statewide coalition pushing for economic investments to raise up some of our state’s most hard-working, but underserved, communities.

Nicky then played a pivotal role in electing Trustee Gonzalez Brito and Trustee Louis Quinlan (former Laney College machine technology instructor) as the 2024 Board president and vice president. This extremely informed duo is arguably the most student-and-worker friendly board leadership in the history of Peralta.

Through persistence, patience, good will and rigor, Peralta’s board has transformed itself from years of internal strife and dysfunction to now being a model board with agreed-upon democratic norms of respectful deliberation and civility.

These gains are especially significant in an era when public confidence in elected bodies is low and democratic norms are undermined and attacked at many levels.