Nick serves as Director for the Summit Foundation’s Sustainable Cities program. The program works to ensure our cities reduce carbon emissions and pollution through radical climate action, with an aim of full carbon neutrality by 2050. The Sustainable Cities program provides grants to organizations in the U.S. that challenge the structures that inhibit climate progress, with a particular grantmaking focus on grassroots, policy, and environmental justice organizations. He also serves as the co-chair of New York Philanthropy’s Environmental Funders Table and the Equitable Transportation Fund and sits on the boards of the Spring Street Climate Fund and Spring Street Action.
Prior to joining Summit, Nick was the Campaign Director for the Northeastern U.S. for the Energy Foundation, where he led grantmaking and strategy with grantees throughout the region. Before his career in philanthropy, Nick was an advocate: he was the Executive Director of the U.S-based nonprofit Tri-State Transportation Campaign and, before that, the Deputy Director of the Riders Alliance. In those roles, he was one of the leaders in the fight to win congestion pricing in New York and has won campaigns focused on funding billions of dollars in transit and transportation improvements in the greater New York City region. While at Tri-State, Nick served on several government advisory councils in New York and New Jersey.
Nick was also the Sierra Club’s Northeastern Communications Director and a Senior Associate at BerlinRosen, where he advised advocacy organizations on strategy and communications. He began his career working in economic justice at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, where he led campaigns for workers’ rights in the transportation, construction, and hotel industries. He is a native of the L.A. region and often cites growing up in the county with the worst air quality in the U.S. as a powerful motivator for the work he does. Nick is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and now resides in New York City, where he spends his free time working on a forthcoming book from Island Press about how advocates won congestion pricing.