Nicole Gomez Patalano (she/her)

Justice Initiative Director

nicole@catalystmt.org

Civic engagement has been a value in my family stretching back to my grandfather, who ran for office and won amidst the poverty, racism, and segregation of rural Colorado at a time when Latinos were even less represented in government than we are now. (A family heirloom is a 1960 campaign poster featuring him down the ballot from JFK.) My own catalyst to getting involved came through my work with incarcerated youth in Montana. Hearing their stories of how often hunger or the need to provide for younger siblings had been the impetus for committing crimes of lack, for which they were now trapped in cycles of incarceration, inspired me to work in community to build power against the criminalization of poverty.