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Nicki Bazer

What would you like to accomplish within the next 5 years?

My work focuses on helping individual public housing residents and public housing resident organizations who are affected by the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. The Plan will continue through the next five years and my hope is to provide residents, during that time, with a real voice in the process whether it be in their own individual lives or in the lives of their communities. I hope my work accomplishes the goal that these residents will have a home in their new communities, empowered to make change in their own lives.

What do you think are the biggest issues facing your generation?

Although the legal structures may be in place in our country to protect the rights of all individuals and to create equality, one of the biggest issues facing our generation is how to ensure that individual rights are protected and that such equality exists. As wealth in our country becomes even more unevenly dispersed and issues of class and race discrimination continue to persist in pervasive yet subtle ways, the real challenge to our generation is to combat inequality and injustice in a time when obvious targets, such as Jim Crows laws, no longer exist.

What do you hope to learn from more established leaders?

What I hope to learn from more established leaders is the endurance to continue the fight for social justice, the patience to see each fight through despite the many set backs and the resilience to fight on regardless of what obstacles I face. In my own life, in school and in my current work, I have seen leaders who work quietly on these problems, with little public recognition or acclaim, helping hundreds of people and making society a little better than they found it. It is these people that I hope to learn from and on whom I model my own life and work.

What do you think more established leaders can learn from your work?

My hope is that established leaders can learn from my work that it is important to focus on empowering individuals to solve their own problems rather than believing that outsiders have all the answers.

What is the most gratifying aspect of your work?

The most gratifying aspect of my work is working with individual people, my clients. Working side by side with public housing residents, despite the differences in our lives and backgrounds, to solve problems in their lives and in their communities is a tremendous thing.

How do you work around those obstacles?

The biggest obstacle in my work is that most people view my clients, public housing residents, as a drain on society, unworthy of assistance, who do not deserve to have a real voice in their lives and in their communities. While this is a challenge in my work, more importantly, this is an obstacle that my clients face day in and day out.

What tools or resources do you need to help you continue your work?

By stepping up and demanding that my clients be heard, I challenge these assumptions daily. At times it is impossible to overcome this obstacle but by lending my voice so that others will be heard, sometimes attitudes change. At the very least, my clients’ rights are protected in the process.

What advice would you give to younger folks wanting to impact social justice issues?

I am proud of how much we achieve as an agency with limited resources. Additional people and funding to run programs would allow us to do even more. For example, as lawyers we can only do so much to assist residents in establishing themselves in CHA’s new mixed-income communities. Resources to hire or to collaborate with community organizers would go a long way to benefit the residents and to allow them to stake out their place in these new developments.

Roll-up your sleeves and dive in! There are so many projects and areas that need help. Just pick a place and start your work.

Define leadership.

I define leadership as the ability to empower others to find their own voices and to identify their strengths and to use both to make a positive difference in the world.