Nicole Manapol

Nicole Manapol is a Senior Program Director for the International Economic Development Council (IEDC), where she leads the Economic Recovery Corps program, a new, $30 million collaborative initiative designed to build capacity in some of the hardest-hit and most economically distressed areas across the U.S. while cultivating the next generation of economic development leaders.

Since 2003 Nicole has worked at the intersection of international development, entrepreneurship and education designing and leading a variety of programs from small community-based projects to large-scale global initiatives. Working on behalf of the US State Department, Microsoft, USAID and the higher education sector, Nicole has lived and worked in 14 countries across Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. What she loves most about her line of work is creating opportunities for people, organizations, and communities to realize their potential.

Some of her most meaningful work to date includes building the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Women in Technology (WIT) Program from 2006-2010, a public-private partnership initiative funded by the US State Department and Microsoft to promote women’s economic empowerment through technology across nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. By the program’s end in 2010, WIT had impacted over 7000 women to advance in their personal and professional lives, helped 60 civil society organizations run IT Centers as sustainable social enterprises, created over 250 jobs for women trainers in the program and launched several successful women owned businesses.

In 2010 Nicole transitioned into higher education where she worked to promote social innovation in the sector through the development of strategic university-community engagement initiatives at Charles Darwin University (CDU) in Australia’s Northern Territory and Outback region. At CDU Nicole designed and led the Aspire Program, a holistic four-year leadership program based in Australia’s Northern Territory supporting low-income, indigenous and BIPOC secondary school students’ progression into tertiary study through service-learning, mentorship, peer networking, teacher-parent engagement, and teacher training. In 2020, Aspire graduated its highest number of college-bound indigenous students in the Northern Territory’s history.

Nicole’s work in higher education was recognized in 2011 by the Talloires Network where she received the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship. Nicole served as an Executive Board Member for the Australian Education Collaborative Network (ACEN) and has been a featured speaker at Ashoka U Exchange (2014) and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).

While Nicole loved the opportunity to impact communities all over the world, as a western New York native she craved building something locally, contributing and being part of something that benefits the place she comes from. In February 2017 Nicole took on a newly created role to lead the Letchworth Gateway Villages program, an alliance of municipalities committed to fostering long-term economic and environmental vitality through growing the region’s outdoor recreation economy. In her four years leading the initiative, Nicole grew the collaboration from three municipalities to four counties and generated $1.2 million in new private, state, and federal resources to advance the alliance’s rural development priorities.

Nicole is a Peace Corps Fellow with an MPA from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and holds a BS in International Affairs from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.