Activist Nikki Bond is on the Move

Despite the pressures of being a wife, the mother of five boys and a full-time graduate student in RIC’s School of Social Work, Nikki Bond still has the passion and energy to fight the inequities she finds within her community.

Her sensitivity to injustice was informed by the rawness of her own life experiences. She had many battles with the state system to get treatment for her son who suffered from addiction and a mental health disorder. But it was RIC faculty who taught her the rules of engagement.

“RIC helped me to become brave,” she said. “I’ve learned that I have a voice and that I don’t need to be afraid to use it. I’ve also learned that sometimes you can be too brave and say things that turn people off, that it doesn’t matter what you know. If you can’t persuade anyone, then you’re not going to get anything done.”

Bond exudes a Buddha-like stillness on the one hand and the soul of a leader on the other. She never set out to become a social worker.

“I simply wanted the tools to help people,” she said. “When I looked into RIC’s social work curriculum, I knew it would give me the tools I needed.”

Now in her final year of graduate school, Bond is testing out those tools at an internship with the North Providence Health Equity Zone under Director Liz Vachon, her field supervisor.

“I’m just so grateful for it,” she said. “I take everything I’m learning in the classroom and apply it to my internship, which makes for a much richer education.”

The Health Equity Zone’s mission is to create community programs that target any obstacle to the health of children and families in North Providence, including education, substance abuse, mental health disorders and difficulty accessing healthy food and health care.

A native of North Providence, Bond brings her knowledge of the community and schools to the project.

One of the project’s initiatives was to address the growing mental health issues among students. With one social worker per school, the schools are not equipped to handle the need. So the Health Equity Zone brought services to the schools.

They partnered with Tri-County Community Action Agency, Gateway Healthcare and Children’s Friend and Service – agencies that identify children at-risk and intervene as early as possible.

Another initiative was to create an after-school youth center in North Providence, which opened fall 2016. The Health Equity Zone is also working to reduce school suspensions in North Providence.

“North Providence High School students make up two percent of all high-schoolers in Rhode Island yet make up 10 percent of the school suspensions each year,” Bond said.

Bond is particularly concerned about the racial aspect of this problem, noting, “In some urban areas, if you are a child of color in an elementary school, you are six times more likely to be suspended than if you are a white child; and every time you’re suspended you’re more likely to be arrested later in life.”

Bond wants to see schools replace punitive practices with restorative practices, involving mediation rather than suspension. “Restorative practices means not participating in exclusionary discipline,” she said. “Exclusionary discipline is expelling a child or sending them to the in-school suspension room. Either way, the child is being excluded. I’d also like to see schools become more representative of the racial makeup of our community. We don’t have enough teachers of color.”

Technically, Bond’s internship is 20 hours a week, but Bond does so much more, said her field supervisor. Together, Bond and Vachon write budgets and grants, leverage resources for the youth center, research funding for programs and meet weekly with the school superintendent to discuss new initiatives.

“I’ve had interns who are micro social workers, focused on direct counseling with individuals and families, and macro social workers, who work with large communities and systems. Nikki has both macro and micro skills, which a lot of people don’t have,” said Vachon. “She is super-talented.” 

And she is now armed with the tools she needs to fulfill her life’s purpose.

Crediting the School of Social Work’s internship requirement, Bond said, “Without it, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do the work I am doing.”

But Vachon predicts, “She’ll be a leader no matter what she does.”

Bond is also president of RIC’s Master of Social Work Student Organization, a board member of the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers and she was a presenter at RIC’s 2016 Promising Practices Conference.​