Built from love. Led by experience.
Nicole has always shown up for people. First as a volunteer at Los Robles Hospital and Habitat for Humanity, later as the neighbor who quietly began caring for the woman next door as her health declined. Caregiving was never something Nicole chose so much as something that chose her.
That truth crystallized thirty minutes into her very first professional caregiving shift. She arrived at 6am to a quiet, dimly lit bedroom shared by two residents, one in her care, the other still asleep. What she witnessed next wasn't in any brochure: a caregiver entering without a word of greeting, handling a resident roughly while she moaned in pain, still half asleep. Residents left on activity room floors. Colleagues who told her, without hesitation, that this was normal.
Nicole sat in the corner and cried. Then she decided she was going to change it.
She immersed herself in everything: dementia care, aging science, operations, advocacy. She became a certified Dementia Care Therapist and a Residential Care for the Elderly specialist. She became someone families requested by name, someone who believed, without apology, that every person deserves to be treated with dignity in the final chapters of their life, regardless of their diagnosis, their income, or what the industry has normalized.
Today Nicole serves as President of Builders of Care, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming how our society supports seniors, families, and the caregivers who serve them. She is also building Mosaic Memory Care, boutique memory care homes in Dripping Springs, Texas, where sixteen residents per home will be known by name, cared for like family, and loved without condition.
Nicole isn't just talking about the changes that need to happen in senior care. She's building them.