Nicole Paquette – 20 Under 40
Communities Foundation of Texas
Education: Saginaw Valley State University
Nicole Paquette is passionate about civic engagement and literacy.
Prior to joining Communities Foundation of Texas in 2017 as director of marketing and communications, she held various communications roles over a decade at the Bay County Library System in Bay City, Michigan, and spent five years as communications manager at the Community Foundation of the Holland/Zeeland area in Holland, Michigan.
“I began working at my local library in high school and fell in love with helping others from that very first job,” Paquette said. “I became passionate about civic engagement and communications in college and ended up writing grant proposals for regional community foundation funding through my university.”
In Dallas, she co-led Big D Reads in 2021-2022, a community book club initiative in partnership with Communities Foundation of Texas, nonprofit publisher Deep Vellum, D Magazine Partners, and 50+ other community partners and sponsors. As part of the initiative, Big D Reads printed 30,000 copies of The Accommodation by Jim Schutze, which tells the mid-century history of Dallas, centered on the civic response to the bombing of Black residents’ homes in South Dallas.
Paquette serves on the Friends of the Dallas Public Library board of directors, has served on the organization’s executive committee, and has twice co-chaired its annual fundraising event, Love Local in 2022 and A Novel Night Out in 2019.
She is a Mayor’s Star Council graduate and helped lead the organization’s rebrand in 2021-22 to Engage Dallas. She now serves on the Engage Dallas advisory committee and is a new board member of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She is a 2019 graduate of the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce’s LEAD YP program.
Since 2014, Paquette has served on the national steering committee CommA, a professional association of community foundation communicators, where she now serves as chair.
She serves on the Philanthropy Southwest communications committee and is a founding member of the Communication Network’s ComNetworkLocal Dallas-Fort Worth chapter.
In 2023, Paquette received the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award from the University of North Texas Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism.
Communities Foundation partnered with People Newspapers on our 2023 20 Under 40 program.
What was your toughest business/personal challenge?
Giving and volunteerism numbers are dropping, and it is going to take each of us to change that so our communities have the resources they need. We also have a very low voter turnout rate for local elections here in North Texas, especially in our millennial age demographic. There’s so much on our local ballots that affects our day-to-day quality of life, and I hope we can increase civic engagement and awareness drastically here.
What would you tell an 18-year-old you?
You’ve already found your passion/calling (writing, libraries, civic engagement, and community foundations) and it will put you on a path to lead in ways you can’t even dream of! 18-year-old me also wouldn’t have believed I would ever move away from Michigan or my family, either!
