Nicole Homerin on Becoming an Advocate by Trailblazing in Education

NICOLE HOMERIN, M.Ed. (she/her) is the Director of CVI Education in The CVI Center at Perkins School for the Blind. She is excited to return to Perkins, where she began her career as a Teaching Assistant in the Deafblind Program. Nicole formerly served as a special education teacher for students with a variety of disabilities, including CVI, in both Boston and Los Angeles. Most recently, she served as the Inclusion Communities Manager at Partners for Youth with Disabilities. In this role, she oversaw the Dinah F.B. Cohen NDMC DREAM Fellowship, a national fellowship for college students and recent graduates with disabilities. She also wrote curriculum and provided trainings to mentoring organizations, non-profits, schools, communities, and corporations on disability inclusion, accessibility, and a variety of other disability-related topics.

Nicole is passionate about disability advocacy and making learning accessible and equitable for students and teachers alike.She was named the 2023 Steve Bartlett Award recipient by RespectAbility for her work in disability advocacy, leadership, and empowerment. She was also named the recipient of the 2023 Trailblazer Award from Boston University Wheelock School of Education and Human Development for her exemplary leadership in the fields of education and disability advocacy. She serves on the Heumann Education Advisory Council for the Just Say Hi! Inclusive Education Curriculum created by the Cerebral Palsy Foundation.Nicole holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education from Boston College and a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from Boston University.

Editor's  Note: Nicole has also completed six marathons.'

HomerinEducationalServices@gmail.com

https://www.perkins.org/cvi-now/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/homerinn/

Company: Homerin Educational Services

Partners for Youth with Disabilities: https://pyd.org/

HOSTS

KATIE CORBETT iis a marketing professional and entrepreneur who brings passion for accessibility to all she does. Katie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and a certificate in human resources from Madison College. 

AKIRA NAKANO is the Program Officer for the Fox Family Foundation and the Producer of the "Innovating Inclusion" Podcast. He runs the Los Angeles Inception Orchestra which is currently working to provide music education to people of all abilities.  He was the host of the previous Fox Family Podcast and the Inception Podcast.

www.innovatinginclusion.org

Transcript

Opening Music Starts

STEVEN McCOY

Welcome to Innovating Inclusion, Everyone! 

ANGIE CASTRO

We're not supposed to use the word “inspiring” when we’re talking about disability, but today, an inspiration. 

KATIE CORBETT

Today we're talking to disability advocate, special education teacher, and marathoner, Nicole Homerin. In this episode, she shares her experience with disability, which started when she was just six months old, and how that led her to her current job at Perkins School for the Blind, and all about the amazing work she's done along the way.

I'm joined on this interview by our producer, Akita Nakano. He hosted the previous Fox Family Foundation podcast, and he also served as the Foundation's Program Officer. 

STEVEN

You guys forgot to ask the rapid fire questions. 

KATIE

We would've kept talking to Nicole for hours if she hadn't had another meeting scheduled back to back after us.

ANGIE

Well, we're excited to hear it. Enjoy the episode, everybody!

Opening Music Ends

AKIRA NAKANO

So we're here today with Nicole Homerin, who is an advocate, writer, and lifelong learner. Her bio says that after spending many years working as a teacher of students with disabilities and reflecting on her own lived experience, she began to realize how many aspects of the education system actively work against what is best for students and their families, which we know, and I'm excited to talk about.  Nicole, welcome. 

KATIE

We are very pleased to have you. 

NICOLE HOMERIN

Thank you so much for having me. 

KATIE

So we're talking about inclusion and accessibility, and we're wondering what does inclusion mean to you? 

NICOLE

Such a loaded word that is so hard to describe, I think. Because I think you see often so many times places being like, we're fully inclusive. We serve all individuals. We have an inclusive mindset. But then you see little bits and pieces of arenas where either someone is being left out or the system is not built so that the person can thrive in inclusion. And so I think really when you're thinking about what picturesque world of inclusion would look like is that we really reach out to the people in those communities and say, what do you need to feel included and be supported?

So many of the systems in place where we, quote/unquote, build inclusion, whether that's schools or communities or what have you, it's, “We built this inclusive program or inclusive setting,” and we never once consulted someone who is affected by that particular disability or that is a part of that community.

It's not exclusive to disability. I think when you talk about intersectionality, race, socioeconomic status… like we build all of these systems thinking we're quote/unquote, inclusive, but we never actually asked the people in those communities, what do you need to succeed? 

AKIRA

I know that your journey started when you were very, very young. Do you wanna tell everybody? 

NICOLE

Yes. I was born, and unbeknownst to me, shortly before birth, the doctors noticed that there was something wrong with my heart, but they didn't actually tell my parents. After my mother gave birth, they quickly noticed that I wasn't growing and diagnosed me with ventricular septal defect, which is a hole in my heart.

And so I underwent open heart surgery when I was six months old. And growing up, I experienced a lot of differences in the way I was treated, whether by my parents or by school, having to go to a lot of doctor's appointments… having to wear a halter monitor to school… and the kids asking like, what is that? And making fun of me. My gym teacher's asking, “Are you sure you can participate in things?” My parents always being hesitant. But there was never really a conversation about what disability is and what it means. I think back then that label was really not used in the context that it is now with so much advocacy, so I really didn't actually understand that I lived in a world of disability and difference from everyone around me until much, much later in life. And it's funny because even throughout high school, I worked at my first volunteer experience that became a job was working at a pediatric rehab center. So it was occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, for variety of children. And I loved it. But I had no idea that I loved it because I identified with it. It completely went over my head that that was where I felt understood. It didn't add up because no one ever told me about the disability community or introduced that fact. So I don't think I really even realized how much the disability community was a part of my life until really, maybe a couple of years ago. So it took almost a lifetime. 

KATIE

Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I can relate to a lot of what you said because as a person growing up totally blind, there were a lot of people in my life too who told me that I couldn't do things that I wanted to do and I mean, I had a lot of supportive people in my life too, and, and that really helped. But that was definitely something I had to deal with as well. 

NICOLE

Yeah. 

AKIRA

So as you were getting into your education, how did inclusion and your exploration of the world of disability guide your career guide, your education? 

NICOLE

I went to Boston University for early childhood education for undergraduate, and in that program we were very whole child centered. It wasn't focused on special education, though I did have some introduction to it. But I began to understand the importance of educating the whole child and the whole family, and then continued on to get my Master's in special education. And during those programs, I realized that there was never a lot of attention placed to the perspectives of the individuals themselves. It was very, this is what would be, quote/unquote, ideal education, or this is evidence-based practice, which is important, and we do a lot of scientific research. But on the same hand, we also need the voices of those people who experience those interventions or education and are those really beneficial to them?

And it wasn't until I started talking a lot more with disability advocates and adults with disabilities that I understood what in their educational careers may have been really supportive of them feeling like they were included and supported to success. And what actually made them feel like this was not the education that I wanted, or my teachers didn't push me enough 'cause they thought I wasn't capable or they dismissed me. I didn't realize that I was actually unintentionally ableist in my education approach because I didn't know any better. So looking back on those years, I think about a lot of things that in hindsight, I would've done differently because I didn't understand how those educational practices may have implications to those individuals in the future.

KATIE

Oof. Yeah. Nicole, what innovations are you bringing to the table now as you realize that education, as it was in the past, wasn't working? 

NICOLE

So I think I first had to look inward and think to myself like, what assumptions am I making as an educator and an individual, right? We all have bias. It's human nature. So what am I bringing to the table, which is my educational experience, my background as a multiracial individual, my background as someone living with a disability but not knowing for a while, and kind of just sitting with that for a moment and then being open to asking the hard questions to those individuals in the room of what has been helpful, and what has been hurtful in your educational experience or really listening when a child says, “I don't like that, or I don't wanna do that.”

So much of our education system is built around conformity. And right, like curriculum is built around this one set of ideas and it doesn't always work. So I think that sometimes that in my early days, what I thought of as non-compliance, now I understand, is advocacy by an individual. So are they saying, I don't wanna do this right now because they're trying to get out of it, or really because it is hurtful to them because they don't understand… because they don't feel capable. What is the reasoning behind it and kind of taking that step back. So now I do a lot of one-to-one tutoring for individuals with a variety of disabilities, and a lot of it is asking them what ways do you learn best? What is happening in your school setting that is helping you and what is not helping you?  So that I make sure that I am not perpetuating the things that they're experiencing in the classroom that don't help them. And even educating families too, because I do tutor online, and I had one mom telling the child, “Oh, you need to make sure you pay attention and look in the camera and like, don't eat on camera.” 

And I was like, it actually doesn't matter how you focus the best, if that's gonna help you understand this. Do whatever you need to do. And empowering that individual to advocate for themselves. 

KATIE

Oh, you are so right. How do you think your understanding of the disability community makes such a progressive impact on the people you work with?

NICOLE

I think vulnerability goes a long way and authenticity. So I am not afraid to tell the whole story of my life, my career, the mistakes that I've made, why I make intentional decisions the way that I do now. Because I think that oftentimes, I, having been on the receiving end of professional development opportunities, I understand that some of them aren't helpful or aren't realistic or come from a place that seems like I know more than you do, 

And I very much come from a framework of this has been my experience. This is what people in the disability community have taught me. If you have different experiences, please share them with me because I by no means know everything and ultimately I'm gonna share my story. But you know your communities the best. So in my role now, I work with teachers nationwide and I always say this is what works for us in our community. But I don't know your community. I don't know the language they speak. I don't know your demographics. I don't know if your families have priorities that are different than education, or maybe they look at education in a different way than my community does. So I think making it a not hierarchical approach.

We are all in this together, learning together every day, making mistakes every day. Just because I've done this for X amount of years and you've done this for X amount of years, doesn't mean really anything. Because ultimately, the individuals with disabilities are the experts of their own experience.

I don't love when people say a lot anymore that people are experts in the field, because I feel like I am an expert in my own individual experience, and I can claim that. But outside of that, I just say I have experienced working with a variety of people, but I don't claim to be an expert because I'm not them. I hear it way too much these days and it irks me, especially scientific. It's very common in the science field and I just dunno… 

AKIRA

Would you like to tell us what your best professional development was? We know lots of people in the field and so can you walk us through what organizations or what mentoring changed you the most or helped you forward think the most?

NICOLE

Yeah, so I would actually have to say that my Fellowship at Respectability, which is now Disability Belongs, was pretty transformational for me. I was a Fellow in the summer of 2020, so it was the unique experience of being introduced to the world of disability fellowship in the middle of a global pandemic with people around the world that I had never would've in a million years have met because the program had just gone online, and I really honestly had no idea what I was getting into.

I landed that role by being at home, furloughed from a job, watching a webinar they did, looking up their website and applying, not hearing anything, and then emailing them, and they were like, we missed your application, but we'd love to talk to you like tomorrow. And it was very happenstance, but I never intended to go that career route.

If the pandemic hadn't happened, if I wasn't furloughed from my job, I would've still been a teacher. And so that opportunity really made me stop and think who I was surrounded by, what information I was getting introduced. A lot of the ableism notions that I started to learn about. The assumptions that I had had being a teacher and then trying to understand how we were pivoting the world in a global pandemic and the things that were impacting that community, but that was given very little voice in the media or in policies and things like that, really just changed the way that I looked at everything that I did.

AKIRA

Yeah, that's fabulous to hear because you and I actually met the next year when we were funding the first cohort of blind Fellows at Respectability. So that was the one and only time I've seen you in person. But you were doing work at Cal State LA I think it was great, and so I'm really pleased to hear that you got so much out of that Fellowship.

NICOLE

Yeah. Such an interesting life trajectory at that point in time. So I was. Working with Cal State LA At the time I was in a PhD program for Special Education that was dual program between Cal State LA and UCLA. And while I absolutely loved the content, I was learning from the professors, everything about the learning experience, I started to understand how ableist the university system is.

It's not necessarily on an individual level, it's more of a systemic issue. When you look globally at universities and academia, PhD programs, the way they're set up and… ironically, at the time, my dad was in a nursing home, so I was doing a lot of his care remotely because we were locked out during the pandemic, and I was experiencing a lot of challenges because I was trying to serve as a caregiver and take these phone calls during times that I was supposed to be in class or have a meeting. And the structure of that program was so strict that I also started to understand that it was perpetuating the notion to me that I couldn't have a priority that was not school.

It was one thing to experience that, but it was another thing to look at my life and say, I love teaching others. I don't wanna work for a system in five years that I'm teaching in a system that perpetuates ableism to students with disabilities, which again, on a professor level, none of my professors did. 

When you're looking systemically, and you look at all of these disability access centers at these universities, there's stories every day about how students are being left out. And I just was like, I don't think that I can put myself in that system. So after a year, I actually withdrew from the PhD program and ultimately that's how I found my job at Partners for Youth with Disabilities working on the advocacy side instead. It kind of pivoted my whole mindset into what is my end goal in life? Like, what do I really feel passionate about and what systems do I wanna be a part of? We need change makers on the inside to make those changes in these systems that continue to be ableist. But unfortunately, it moves so slowly and I was just like, I can't be the one to make that change right now. And so I need to be in a system that is on the advocacy side at this moment in time.

AKIRA

Nicole, so as you transitioned into Partners for Youth with Disabilities, I think that's where we connected again, and I love this idea of advocacy from the inside. Can you tell us what were your goals there? How did you wanna make a change? Because I often see that there are so many great leadership employment training programs like Respectability, but the idea that we're working with people with disabilities, trying to get them employed, and then there's still a barrier on the employer side. That's sort of my big thing. So what sort of ways did you see that you wanted to make changes as you were there?

NICOLE
Part of my role was overseeing a paid fellowship for college students with disabilities. So it was open to current college students, graduate students, and recent grads. And the whole premise was to take ten of them and really create a project that they wanted to do. And so the way that I saw it was really getting their feedback on what are the barriers they see in their lives at this.

In five years from now, that group could say different things, but really looking at them and saying, okay, what are you passionate about? What are you experiencing in your communities, in your colleges, in your states? And talking about not only using that project as a way to share their experiences, but using that project as a way to work on these soft skills that are so important to so many other jobs. And I think that's often overlooked because vocational programs are fantastic. But oftentimes we do see a lot of those vocational programs who do the traditional like go bag groceries, go help volunteer at X, Y, Z place, things like that. And again, while they're great, maybe that's not the experience that those individuals want. And then also in a world that works very remotely these days and needs typing skills and writing skills, that's not gonna translate when they're trying to go get a job. So really what I wanted for them to do was, we are creating a project, but every week it was, can you meet together with your colleagues and have a conversation? And does everyone have a voice? Do they feel like they have a voice or do they need to feel like they're part of this group? If they need support, are they able to reach out to their quote/unquote, supervisor, me? And if not, how do I help them enough to feel empowered, but not feel like they need to rely on that supervisor? Right? Because there's that fine line and all of those, if you're gonna be absent to a meeting, did you email? And while it's totally fine, right? At some point when you get a job, if you don't show up and you don't tell anyone, you're not gonna have a job. So I think a lot of those skills of talking about what do you need to succeed, not just in this setting, but as you move forward, and how can I support that on a different level for different people, right? Because some people had all of those skills already, but they could use more mentorship in career guidance. So we would meet one-on-one and talk about that. I also think sharing it from a place of, again, going back to authenticity and vulnerability, of experiences that I had personally… of changing careers, or moving, or taking gap years in college, or facing barriers were often a lot of the organizations, you'll see that lead programs for young adults with disabilities are not disability led, and that's problematic. Because then you're having someone who doesn't understand that community and their needs, and again, while I say I don't know what it's like to be blind or use a wheelchair, I can tell you based on my experience what I've had with the disability settings that I've been in, and at least there's that shared commonality. And so I think that's a place that we need to continue striving to because as I've seen communities grow, I still see this problem where we don't have leaders at the top who have disability.

Even in my current role, I am the only one on my team with a disability. I'm the only one on my team who's multiracial. There's no, in a director role, which is important, like we need leaders at the top to show that this is possible, because otherwise we still perpetuate the system of hierarchical jobs and quote/unquote disability, not being good enough for that, and that's not okay.

KATIE

I've had personal experience with this because I worked for an organization whose CEO has vision loss like me and before she was the CEO of this organization, she also had been a successful business owner for twenty years, and she was just such a wonderful example of leadership. And I think that my decision to go and start my own business came a lot from working with her and seeing what a leader with a disability could do.

NICOLE

I love that you mentioned that because. It wasn't until maybe, I dunno, five years ago, that I even started talking about openly my life and my experiences. And I think that I was empowered to do that more and more because as someone with living with an invisible disability, per se. There was so much assumption that I was quote/unquote, able-bodied, because on the outside I looked successful, whatever that means. Right? But that's kind of what people think, right? And putting you in a box. And there's so much to the stories still that I'm learning to share and open up to. But I think really just wanting people to understand that what appears to be this easy journey was not at all, and these were the barriers and this is the experience that we face, and we need more people having those conversations. Because if we don't, then people aren't comfortable having them. It becomes this taboo, stigmatized topic, which it shouldn't be. We have a couple of parents of students with disabilities on our team, which is great, and I love their perspective, and it's equally important to have individuals themselves. 

AKIRA

 It's taken me some time to really discuss living with disability and things. I actually do a lot of music. And I think the reason that I don't talk about it is 'cause I'm a producer and, and no one knows, I don't really hear very well in my right ear, and I hear quarter pitch off between the two. So I've had to really figure out how to compensate. So of course I won't talk about that in the music space. Just because no one needs to know. I've figured it out. But it does become something that with colleagues like Katie, it's become important to really talk about some more. And then I had a major heart issue a couple years ago as well, and so that really also reflected my kind of how I'm seeing things. 

It's a little bit different, but I tend to do something where I… and I know this isn't right, because before I used to say, “So what?” It wasn't about the disability. To me, it was about what could you do? Are you the most competent? I don't care what you look like, I don't care what you have, I want the most competent person at the table. I wanna learn from you. But the other side of that is it's not providing that cohort support. Here I am there and I've come to learn that I need to evolve a little bit. So I've been working on it, but…

NICOLE 

Yeah. And I think it can, the brain, it can be, we sometimes don't realize how lonely and isolating it can be 'cause, right. You do, you create these compensatory strategies and really we all have compensatory strategies in life. And if we just normalize the fact like, this is what you need, this is what I need, how can we help each other? I don't think necessarily that people who. aren't either part of the disability community or understand it, understand that that can be a full-time job too, right? Whether you're coordinating appointments or your access needs or… It just so happened that my neighbor uses a wheelchair now, and we got into a discussion because every other day the elevator in our apartment goes out. And he has had to call the fire department more times than is imaginable. And just all of these conversations that people don't have on a daily basis that impact the way that we do our jobs, live our lives. So it's not, I came to work at 8:00 AM. Like, did you see what I had to do to get to work at 8:00 AM? Did you have to get up and take medication? Did you have a personal care attendant who called out sick? And you had to figure out what all of these things that impact the way that people can be successful in their jobs, but we don't talk about 

AKIRA

Katie came from Wisconsin to LA, and it took her a million years because she had to take the bus to Chicago and to… 

NICOLE

That was right. I mean, you're right. It like takes a million years regardless. because of all of these factors. And every time I look outside, I laugh to myself, because the way that we shovel in cities makes no sense for disability. Like you walk outside my house, and you're just like, what is this? And I can even navigate it as the person who ambulates. I just don't understand.

AKIRA

Nicole, I really want to congratulate you on your position at Perkins, and I want you to explain or tell everybody how you got there, why you got there, and what you're doing. 

NICOLE

Sure. The backstory is that after I graduated from Boston University in 2015, my first role in education was as a teaching assistant in the Deafblind program at Perkins School for the Blind, which is in Watertown, Massachusetts. Again, my degree was in early childhood education, so I didn't know anything about deafblind, blind education, anything. I just hopped into a job as a college grad. Changed my life, and I knew immediately that that's where I wanted to hone in on. So. after working there for two years, there's a similar school at Boston College called the Campus School for Students with Similar Disabilities, and it's on Boston College's campus. And as an employee, we had tuition remission. So I was encouraged to get a job there and at the same time get my Master's degree.

 And while I was doing that, I was still working at Perkins part-time, covering residential shifts, and I worked in the outreach program doing weekend programming for children from first grade through graduation on a variety of topics. Love, love, love it. So when I moved to Los Angeles… Again, I was moving to help take care of my dad in 2019. I was really sad to leave that population 'cause that was my home for the four years post-grad. So I always kept in touch with everyone whenever I visited and things like that. And in 2023, when I started my education business, a former mentor teacher of mine reached out to me, and they were looking for educators who had experience with children with CVI, which is Cerebral Cortical Visual Impairment, the leading cause of blindness for children in the US. They needed a working group to come together and have monthly meetings and discuss a new project. So I was like, absolutely. And I just started doing that as a volunteer position. And at the time, you know, I was still working at Partners for Youth with Disabilities remotely.

First of all, I knew I was ready to move back to Boston. Funny enough, on a trip to DC for the National Mentoring Conference that I went to with Partners for Youth with Disabilities, my former mentor from Respectability was friends with Judy Heumann. And so I went on a lunch date with her and Judy Heumann, six weeks before Judy passed.

And at lunch, Judy said three things to me. You need to get back into education. You need to move back to the East Coast, and you need to write a book. It's some three things that Judy told me in 2023. And it's so funny because that moment just, I don't know, it was like all the stars collided, and I thought to myself like, what is my trajectory now?

And so what I really wanted to do was take this mindset of advocacy in education and my background in education, and also my desire to support other teachers, right? Because that was kind of where my PhD idea came from. Just so happened to be on the Perkins website one day when they posted a job. And I reached out and was just like, this sounds amazing, and I was in, We're called the CVI Center and my role, I'm the Director of CVI education. So when I started last year, my role was really to help build an educator community because so many of our teachers of the visually impaired. 

TVIs, as Katie probably knows, are very isolated because they're itinerant. So they work in the community, but they don't necessarily have their own classroom. Mostly they do a lot of traveling, and there's not really a place where they can come and share ideas. And the way the education system is, states are different, educations are different. And CVI, being a lot newer diagnosis, but something that is being looked at more in recent years than it has been in the past, people are still really miseducated, uneducated… don't feel prepared. And so my job was really to come in and say like, how can we build? A couple years ago they built a parent community that's really thriving. How can we do the same thing for educators? And so kind of trying to see how we can bring educators together. So I hold monthly educator chats on a topic, and then we also do like a coffee and connect monthly where people can just drop in and bring their ideas or challenges. And I think that space of community building is really important.

And another one of our big pillars in the CVI center is amplifying CVI voices. So we have a lot of advocates who we work with, a lot of adults, a lot of children who we spotlight and say, we used to say X, but the advocates told us that this was not what we should be doing, so we are now changing it. And that was a big draw to me because I was seeing the combination of educational programming, but a big, big emphasis on advocacy in our community, and recognizing that there were things that we currently do or did in the past that we learned from advocates we should not, and we are now following that. 

Special Education in general hasn't, I mean, even the terminology is still problematic, but we've not come to that yet as a community. When you look at education programs that are preparing teachers, they don't do disability advocacy 101. They don't talk about voices in the community. And so I was really drawn to this beautiful team of twelve who really pushed that front too… bring their parent experiences, bring the CVI voices, and bring their educator experiences, and then put that all together because we need both. 

AKIRA

What's your five year goal there? And your 10 year goal? And when's your book coming out?

NICOLE

Okay, so first the day after Judy passed away, I did start writing. I don't know what the long-term idea of that will be. I also write blogs on the side. So I've been just kind of in the professional writing mindset, and I need to get back into it. But I have talked to a couple of book coaches and written things out there, so hopefully in time, someday.

I used to be a huge planner in life where I said, in five years, I wanna X, and in 10 years I wanna y. And long story short, in a very short period of time, I lost a lot of people in my life who meant alot. During those moments of grief, I started to understand that I actually just really wanna live in the present now. And understanding too, that I had to come to terms with a lot of survivor guilt. That these people were passing around me in a world where I found out I… when my dad passed away… that I actually wasn't supposed to survive. Like they really were prepared for the fact that open heart surgery in the nineties was not what it is now. And every time I go to the doctor now they're like, “Are you okay?” I'm like, “Well, I just ran my sixth marathon, so I think so, but so tell me otherwise.” So I think it just taught me a lot that I wanna be in the moment learning and growing and appreciating all that I have right now. Because I don't know that in one year, five years, 10 years, I'll be able to do what I am doing in this life.

Emotional Piano Music Starts

I can continue to feel more comfortable sharing parts of my story that I haven't yet that I want to. But I think it all comes in time, and we all have our own disability journey that we've been on and continue to be on for a lifetime. And we live in a world that still holds a lot of judgment and misunderstanding.

And so I think understanding how to navigate that and not be afraid to be ourselves. But I think the biggest lesson that I've learned is… I hope that myself and other people don't feel limited by the things that they're told by society and by others because so many things that I have done or want to do in my life, people told me I couldn't.

I'm here to give you advice. Please know you can come to me at any time, but ultimately, please don't ever take my advice as what you are gonna do with your life. Do what you wanna do. Whatever other people's opinions, that's their opinion, that's their belief, that's their notion of your disability, but it's not yours. Your perception of yourself and what you want, that's you to decide. And also parents who… it's gotta be scary to have a child that they want to protect in some way. And I, I look back and I realize a lot of that was my upbringing, feeling like I needed to be protected or fixed, quote/unquote, but like understanding now that's not…  My parents were just scared, I think, and having compassion for that and understanding that now I need to go do my own thing, live my own life and be okay. 

Music ends.

AKIRA

And you are certainly far more than okay. Nicole, we wanna thank you for being on today. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you. If people wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way to?

NICOLE

Sure. You can either find me on LinkedIn under Nicole Homerun or my website, which is Homerin Educational Services, or email my business, which is homerineducationalservices@gmail.com. 

AKIRA

Perfect. We'll put those all in the show notes. Nicole, really, thank you so, so, so much. We really, really appreciate it.

NICOLE

Thank you Akira and Katie for having me. 

KATIE

Thank you so much for being here, Nicole, it was so great chatting with you. We really appreciate it. 

Closing Music Starts

NARRATOR

“Innovating Inclusion” is produced in association with InVisions a program of the Fox Family Foundation, whose mission is to break the link between poverty and disability.

The goal of InVisions is to teach high school and college students to innovate with universal design in mind, where young entrepreneurs of all abilities create side by side. So as they become the next generation of leaders and hiring managers, any stigma is gone and the world is accessible to everyone.

Our theme song was written by Alex Kapp, with incidental music by Travis A King and Bruce Maginnis. Our producer is Akira Nakano. Please visit our website, InnovatingInclusion.org.