Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.129 | Feat. Nicole Watts

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Good News York: Community Advocacy with Nicole Watts In this episode of Good News York, host Matt Masur of Click Stream Studios welcomes Nicole Watts, founder of the nonprofit organization Hope Print. Nicole shares her compelling journey of community service, focusing on helping marginalized groups, especially refugees and new Americans. She discusses the organic growth of Hope Print from sharing meals with refugee families to creating various support programs. Nicole also talks about her recent election win and her transition to a political role aimed at fostering community development across Onondaga County. The episode highlights Nicole's dedication to making a positive impact, her love for diverse cultural experiences, and her exciting plans for further community engagement. 00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Shoutouts 01:10 Meet Nicole Watts: Founder of Hope Print 02:31 The Inspiration Behind Hope Print 04:51 Building Hope Print: From Meals to Community Programs 07:24 Adapting Through Seasons and Challenges 13:12 Nicole Watts' Political Journey 18:13 Exploring Onondaga County: Local Favorites 22:30 Conclusion and Contact Information

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to hear about river cruising and Unirold's 50th anniversary summer specials. Hey guys, Matt Mager from ClickStream Studios. Welcome to another edition of Good News, York. I'm here by myself. Mike got lost in a snowbank somewhere. He'll be back eventually, I'm sure. I think he might be here.

I might, is those feet that I saw when I pulled in the parking lot? I thought there was a joke. Anyway, check out our good friend Zach over at Ads on the Go. Get Ads on the Go.com. They are the sponsor of this show and one of the best. And one of the other new sponsors that we have here on Good News, York, is officecalling.com. And real quickly, if you own a business and you want to save some money, your business phone bill is probably the easiest, most low-hanging fruit and the one that almost everybody forgets about. Go to officecalling.com.

and you can just pop in your info and see immediately whether or not you'd get a better deal and you'll get a better deal. Check it out.officecalling.com. Without further ado, we've got an awesome guest here. We've got an incredible woman who not only just one office here in Onondaga County, but is the founder of a really interesting organization that I'm really excited to learn a lot about. So without further ado, welcome Nicole Watts to the show. How are you, Nicole? I'm doing well. How about yourself? Great, great. Thank you again for taking the time and joining us here on the show. Nicole, if you wouldn't mind, give us just the quick overview. Who are you? And what should folks know right off the bat?

Absolutely. So Nicole Watts, I am a proud resident of Syracuse's North Side. I've lived here for the last 15 years doing the work that I have been committing my life to you and is kind of my life call. regarding working with people who have found themselves marginalized due to being displaced from their homeland and having to set up a new life here in America or other inequity and injustice issues that we face in our nation from people who were born right here. And so the work of Hopeprint, the organization that I lead is something that I am really grateful that I have gotten to be a part of and continue to learn every day from my community and absolutely love the life that I get to live here and work here and play here. That's awesome. That's awesome.

Nicole, what inspired you to do this? I mean, there's lots of folks living in all kinds of neighborhoods all over that see these issues. But you jumped in and have taken action. Why? So there are a number of things that happened over the course of my younger life that I encountered the spaces where injustice and inequities and. especially along racial, economic levels. And it just disturbed me deeply back when I was a teenager that was planted in me,

and I never shook it and really set out on a twisting and wild ride to try to figure out what it looked like to show up in those spaces. And I along that ride encountered some families who had just, were literally arriving at the airport from Rwanda as right. refugees and through our friendship and the mutual learning that we were able to undertake through sharing meals and and me being able to contribute navigating living in the U.S. for my whole life, just where to buy underwear and other exciting things like that, I witnessed the transformative difference that it had both on myself and on them to have that relationship and the incredible power that relationship can have to just unlock potential and to help us to really understand. humanity and what it looks like to be human in the world in a different way. So through that relationship and understanding the power of relationship, it inspired me to move down here so I could be closer and not be commuting 30 minutes to have dinner together, but also to be able to expand this work,

to not only be myself and this family, but to include now thousands of other people that have been part of what we've called our hope for family for the last 15 years. So you literally became a part of the community. You're not just, you know, seeing a charity case somewhere else in a different part of town, you've become part of that. That's incredible to me. I think that's ridiculous credibility, honestly, for what you're doing and everything that you've got going on. So thank you for that, first and foremost. Take us through kind of the start of the formal organization, and Hope print. So how did that become an actual organization and get off the ground? So when we very first started, we were sharing meals together. We were getting U-Haul moving trucks

and taking furniture from folks who were getting rid of it to newly arriving families, to their apartments, sharing a cup of tea and conversation that then led to more relationships. And so the network just grew and grew and grew. And very, early in those days is when I moved into the neighborhood with a couple of other folks. And we just started to open up our home like they had opened up their homes to us over the previous months and made Tuesday, essentially the everyone's welcome for dinner night. And so folks came from all across the community and just this beautiful, way overcrowded space of relationship, meal sharing and all kinds of things grew up out of that.

There was a teacher that started teaching English sitting in the front yard with folks and realized they wanted to go to college and that there was a pathway they could take to do that. And so she started to work with them on that to get them into OCC. And they were having this huge circle filled our front yard with how to get into college tutorials from this teacher and continue to expand from there. Other folks were asking if they could pop into one of the side rooms so that they could. sit on the floor and work on English flashcards with somebody or there were kids running all over and someone said, can I do something with the kids? And started to bring all kinds of different activities and academic educational pieces with them. So all of the programming and the work really rose up from those relationships and from people who had different skills and understanding,

people who had different needs, matching up with each other in these organic grassroots ways, and then kind of forming programs that over the years constantly changed. No season of footprint has ever looked the same, whether it's who's part of it, because the folks coming into our community as refugees and New Americans were coming from all over the world, different seasons, different conflicts that we've had as a part of our family. But we say once part of the family, always part of the family. And so it's just been an ever-growing, beautiful network of people working together to make one another's lives better and to make our community a better place.

Wow, wow, that's incredible. Nicole, you mentioned something of the seasons of Hopeprint. Is there, sounds like maybe you have some sort of sequential programming that happens, starts and stops, that sort of thing, something like that? For many years, we functioned in, by trimester, doing kind of seasons of program, presence, and rest, we would call it. And so that was the majority up until COVID. That's how we functioned.

And each season, we would reevaluate what. our community really needed working with our people to say, do we still need citizenship classes or anyone who's needing citizenship assistance right now? Did everybody already get that? Which is, by the way, one of the things you should do in your life someday is go to a citizenship ceremony. You know, whether it was like different needs that we were encountering with different cultures and backgrounds, you know, some folks had all kinds of access to education and their home before conflict came or they were displaced and others did not have that. And so the needs and and different things that were we needed to show up and changed very much trimester to trimester.

And so when COVID hit, though, we organizationally came to a new season because a lot of things changed simultaneously with COVID. There was also a lot of changes that took place at a federal level related to refugee resettlement, which had a profound impact on our community. And so as we, as all the ecosystem was changing around us, we asked the question that we were very practiced at asking, what is our community really need of us now? And we began to focus more on community development work with our entire neighborhood, which includes people from all around the world who've been resettled as refugees, who've come as immigrants, and a whole lot of folks that have either lived here for generations or have migrated here from other parts of the United States.

It's a beautifully diverse neighborhood and to try to come to a space of what does it look like for us together to come up with a vision of what we want this to look like for us to all have the lives that we dream of. And so we did a number of rounds of knocking on doors, talking to people, hosting community forums to come up with a reinvestment proposal for our community. And that led us to the season that we are in today, where we're now an incubator for emerging nonprofits and leaders who have passion projects, where we work alongside of them to try to enact that work. in the community and to give them an on-ramp into taking the things that we did as an organization in our early days and hopefully have an exponential impact by empowering more people and more places

to do that in their little pockets of community. Wow, that's truly incredible. Nicole, I'm asking you, do you have a specific location? You've got a headquarters where all these activities take place, or how does that work? We've always been a bit dispersed and home-based. We, for many years, pre-COVID, we're in literally a home running a lot of these programs out of the home. Today we are, we do not have a headquarters. We are intentionally dispersed because again, we're trying to engage a number of different pockets of community that are in all different geographic spaces even within the neighborhood. We are fortunate that we have some space on the north side that we do use for a number of those programs. But it's really in community work has

always been the heartbeat of what it looks like for hope for it to be present in these spaces. I kind of thought that might have been your answer. And I think that's such a phenomenal approach in terms of really reaching folks where they are. That's really neat. Nicole, so I want to ask you a couple more questions on this. And then I want to jump to another topic for just a moment. So you're telling me about meeting all these different people from all these different countries, these different ethnic groups, sitting down having dinner with them. All it's making me think, maybe it's because I'm hungry, but all it's making me think is all this food.

So I've got to ask you, what is your favorite kind of ethnic food, unique food that you maybe never had growing up that certainly isn't a Syracuse typical thing? Yeah. So I, you are totally right. The food is one of the most delicious bonuses of getting to have this life. I really love learning from all the different cultural communities, just the spices that they use and kind of integrating it into my own cooking. But in terms of like my, I call my comfort food that is like, you know, growing up, it'd have been chicken noodle soup and macaroni and cheese has now transformed to being a foo and Asava and the kind of Congolese, East Central Africans cuisine of kind of like their mainstay. They've had so many friends over the years that made that for me.

And it just kind of became like my home comfort meal. So when I'm having a bad day, I want some foo foo. But my favorite flavors really especially emerged from the Ethiopian cuisine, which is phenomenal. Okay. As well as the Iraqi cuisine is filled with all kinds of fascinating combinations that aren't as traditionally, you know, typically present in the cuisine I grew up on. That's incredible. There used to be a place out in Albany many years ago. It's a gentle cruising. You start to see the village, almost like a painting. Join me, travel expert Darley Newman and Univorl Boutique River Cruises L'ouique Bali to learn about river cruising in France.

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It was an Iraqi restaurant, tiny little place, incredible food. And that's so neat. I don't know if you do this, but just as a suggestion, you ever want an awesome fundraiser? There should do some sort of ethnic food fair or something. You probably do something like that. We did. Pre-COVID.

It was called Culture Gala, and it was a great event. I hope someday we can do it again. That sounds incredible. So if you wouldn't mind, let's pivot for just a moment. And as folks who watch Good News York know, we're not a politics show, so we don't really get into picking sides or debating issues or things like that.

But Nicole did just win an election. And I think it's really interesting to talk to leaders. As folks know, we've had leaders from all parties and things like that. And the reason we do that is because you are the folks who are sort of in the know, right? That's why you're there. You're not, you take office,

specifically, I know you just won the election, but when do you actually take office? I guess you to start with. January 1st, January 1st, 1st, 1, 26. I like that. I don't necessarily like the super long lame duck session. Like, come on, let these folks do what we ask them to do. But anyway, what is that like just as a person from this community leader and doing these things to now sort of getting into that political game and now you've got to, you know, do all these things

that is really a different world. How was that to navigate? So it's not something I set out to do. I have been asked a number of times over the years to consider taking on these positions and felt like the work that I needed to do was being best done at the neighborhood level and in the advocacy side.

But in recent years, I've started to feel a bit of a ceiling when it comes to advocacy and a growing sense of the need for there to be people. who have this grassroots on the ground understanding of the people and the issues that we're facing, also being in these spaces where decisions are being made, where resources are being allocated, that impact our community. And so when I got the call on a, I was actually on my way to

vacation, someone called and said, within the next 48 hours, we need to fill this seat or this person on the ballot. Would you be willing to take this role? And And they let me sleep on it for all of one night. But when I woke up the next morning, I just felt compelled that in this moment in time, for our community, for the people that I love and have welcomed me into their homes and their families and their lives, that to say no was just irresponsible. And so I said yes. And suddenly I was on the wild ride of what it looks like to campaign.

I was not on a major party line, so it was a pretty different situation than it can be for a lot of folks who do that. And one of the most beautiful things that happened during the campaign season was just this manifestation of 15 years in this community and the relationships that I've built that just came out in this way that kept on just touching my soul. Like just it felt like a beautiful, a beautiful entree into a next season. And on the night when I did win, a number of those community folks were with me, and they said, we won, we won. And I hope that that is how they continue to feel on this journey, that government is really meant to be representative. So I hope that we, not only we won an election, but we won being able to see the things that need to happen for our community move forward. After hearing you speak about all the work you've been doing in that community,

there's no way you couldn't win in that community. like talk about a true representative. We don't always get those choices and it's it's so great for your community and our county as a whole, which I guess is sort of my next question as you think about that. Obviously you represent a particular district but also now have to weigh in on issues that span, you know, into the suburbs and well beyond. How do you bring this kind of local neighborhood knowledge to the areas that don't necessarily look like your neighborhood does. So in the early days of living in this region, I did live in other parts of our county. And I'm grateful for that experience as I step into this space because both from living there

and just the work in general, I have a number of relationships across most corners of Onondaga County. So I've, you know, gone out with friends and I've been to their homes and I've shared life with people that live in really different spaces across Onondaga County that augment the life that I get to live here on Syracuse's north side. And so I'm also grateful that the way that the system set up is that we are, we each represent a district. And so we each bring our different knowledge and understanding to the table and hopefully listen well to one another to build, to make decisions that know are for the whole of our county and for all the people that call this place home. So I'm hopeful that we can continue to do that and make decisions that benefit us all.

I get the impression that you're the type of person that is open to conversation with folks and that's just a massive asset for all of us. So I appreciate that so much. So tell me again, I just let's let's have some fun with this. What's your favorite thing, something fun to do in Onondaga County? What's your favorite recreational activity? Maybe for maybe for date night, maybe for family, whatever comes to mind. One of my favorite things to do is to go out to Skinny Atlas, Mirabeau, in the summertime when they have the gardens open with all the beautiful flowers and streams and just sit out there and read or write a grant, even if it's, you know, I know that's work, not fun.

But just to be in that in that beautiful space is like a little reset spot for me. I love all the nature that surrounds us in general. Just getting in my car and just driving, not so much when there's snow on the ground, but the other times of the year, being able to go through the rolling hills and take in the scenery, go to Beacon Schiff and go apple picking in the fall. We live in a place that has a lot to offer, and I am grateful to live here to have access to all those things. I love that. I love every part of that, honestly. That was just such a great, it is. And that's the thing that we love. One of the things, one of the reasons that we do this show specifically is to highlight those things. And we try to talk about a little bit beyond Onondaga County, because one of the things that we feel like is New York State as a whole is such a great thing. And we try to sometimes divide ourselves almost a little too much in our regions. But, you know, we can go in any direction and have the most incredible vacation. And we as a company actually have on more than one occasion taking a little trip to Skinny Atlas and decided we're going to work for there from the day.

So it's such a beautiful place. And it seems like it's distant, but it's not, but it's like a whole other world. It's just, I don't know. And this time of year we got the Christmas. So folks want to go see the Dickens Christmas in Skinny Atlas. Shout out to that incredible thing. It's incredibly famous. People come all over the place.

which I guess that'll be my last thing. So what would you tell folks? A lot of people don't necessarily understand. Having visitors, having tourists, having shoppers from outside the county come to the county is such a huge thing for us. The last thing that I will leave you with, Nicole, is what is your commercial for people outside of Onondaga County? Why should they come check out our awesome area?

So I am a big traveler. I love to see and experience just the things that different communities, like how the architecture is and how the culture is. And we have such an incredible space here and on the Daga County, whether it's the, you know, from the centuries ago housing that still stands. And, you know, last night I went to one of the mansions on James Street that's still standing and folks continue to work to keep it alive and its story alive. And this space is filled with a lot of those places that were history makers in their day. We have beautiful nature. And then, of course, I'm a bit biased. I love our city and the core of our city. And I want to continue to see us get better at sharing that with people that come in from the outside, that they

can taste those amazing flavors, that they can go shopping. So if you come in to Anandaga, county and you want to experience those things. I encourage you to check out just the little shops that you might not normally go into and immerse yourself immediately into a space that feels a bit like you went to Vietnam or or went to Afghanistan or hanging out in Kenya. There are many different little nooks throughout the community that provide these entrees into the diversity of culture we also have here at home. So you can always reach out to us if you want to do that.

I can't find it now. and I hope that we continue as a community to be able to highlight those things to provide those spaces for people to experience the whole of what Onondaga County has to offer the world. I love it. I love it. You can instantly see why she was elected. Nicole, I'm going to let you go and get back to the work of getting ready to take office and everything on top of running this incredible organization. But before we go, we should tell folks how they can find it. So you got a website, Facebook, all those plugs. Hit us with those if you could.

Absolutely. Hopeprint, h-o-pe-p-r-N-T-org is the website. And then all of our social media is also under that name. So if you search that or just backslash it, you should be able to find us on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. And Nicole, I'm guessing that on those resources, they'll answer this question. But I just want to ask you,

for folks that want to help support your organization, what is the best way to do it? Is it a volunteer in person? Is it to make a donation? What can they do? In a consistent way, making a donation is definitely the most helpful. We provide this support and foundational support to these emerging leaders and try not to pass on that expense

as much as possible to the grants and donations that they're able to procure as they build. But in order to do that, we really need a foundational kind of support system to be able to provide these really key resources to emerging leaders in our community. And then also there's ways just to give directly to those folks. If you're inspired by some of the projects you might see, we're also always happy to share more information about what they do and connect you directly to them. That is how we do volunteerism as we match you directly with our partners. And some of them

have more opportunities than others. We usually start with the conversation, figure out where you can plug in and go from there. That's so awesome. That's so awesome. Folks, as all always the links and everything will be right here in the description. Go and dig into this incredible organization. As we've been learning more and more about it, it just gets more incredible. And it's so awesome to see people do this work for their own community, literally.

I absolutely love it. So Nicole, we've taken up way too much of your time already. I thank you for being so generous with us. And any time in the future that there's something interesting or positive or events and fundraisers, all that fun stuff, we would love to help spread the word. So please don't hesitate to reach out. Wonderful.

Thank you so much for having me. Anytime. Wow. What an impressive woman. That was a phenomenal interview. I'm so glad that I got to speak with Nicole and learn about this incredible organization. I can't help but be impressed when people say that, you know,

she moved to the community to be a part of it and serve it. It just doesn't get any more genuine than that to me. I don't know. Anyway, this has been good news. York. It's been a phenomenal episode. Thank you to the whole crew, Danny, Amanda, Mike, Malachi, Ruth, Jackie. I'm just going to start saying names at this point. It's been fun, guys.

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