Syracuse, N.Y. — Manika Gautam had just given birth to her youngest child. But she needed immediate and intense treatment for thyroid cancer.

Her marriage had fallen apart and she needed someone to take care of her newborn. Nicole Watts did not hesitate.

She took tiny Ossum home when he was three days old. She fed him and rocked him. She saw the sun rise with him, paced in the middle of the night with him.

For the first month of his life, when his own mother was too sick to care for him, Watts was his mother.

“It was one of the most beautiful adventures,” Watts said.

Gautam is cancer-free and her son, now 7, calls Watts “Mama Coley.”

Watts, 43, has a life shaped by saying “yes” when many others would step back. Challenges are gifts, she says.

The newest one started in April. Watts was about to shut off her phone as she boarded a flight to California. She took one last call. It was a friend with the Onondaga County Working Families Party. Would Watts, a Democrat, consider running for Onondaga County Legislature, representing her neighborhood on Syracuse’s North Side. She would be a last-minute entry in a three-way race.

She slept on it for a night. And then she did what she does in the face of hard things: Watts said “yes”.

What followed was an unexpected rise to one of the most powerful positions in Onondaga County government. Watts rode a blue wave with other newcomers who won as Democrats swept the legislature.

Then Watts was chosen as the chair of the Onondaga County Legislature. The only other first-term legislator to become chair was current County Executive Ryan McMahon.

For the first time in 50 years, the Democrats are in power in the county legislature. Generations of Republicans rubber-stamping the will of Republican county executives will be replaced with pushback, challenge and negotiation. Watts, who has no political experience, will lead the charge.

Nicole WattsNicole Watts helped care for Manika Gautam’s infant son, Ossum, for his first weeks of life while Gautam was in the hospital for treatment.Provided photo

‘It has to be about the people’

“We have to get back to being about the people when we’re making decisions, and not about party politics,” Watts said. “It has to be about the people.”

Technically, Watts has no political experience. But she has more than a decade of experience in leadership and building consensus. She began and still runs Hopeprint, a nonprofit that serves refugees and Syracuse’s North Side neighborhood.

Watts chaired the Refugee Alliance of Syracuse for several years, and has worked with it and other groups to advocate for some of Syracuse’s most underserved people.

Watts came to Central New York when she graduated from college with a ministry degree. She had an internship in youth ministry at Eastern Hills Bible Church in Manlius, but ended up staying on for 11 years after her internship ended.

During that time, she made friends in the refugee community on Syracuse’s North Side. She found herself there more than she was in Manlius.

“I was driving into the city to come to my friends’ homes for multiple times a week for dinner,” Watts said. “They would give me this beautiful gift of a sense of family and a home cooked meal.”

Watts would help her friends, often refugees, with things that might seem simple to someone who is from here, but so hard when you’re a newly settled refugee. This was during the years when the U.S. was resettling as many as 1,000 refugees a year in Syracuse.

Watts would help with reading the mail, children’s schoolwork, where to find necessities like furniture or underwear.

“I didn’t need a certain degree or background in social work to just show up and be a friend and a neighbor,” she said. “I saw the transformative difference that just relationship makes in in the lives of the families that that I got to be friends with.”

Watts and some friends moved in together into a house on Lilac Street about 15 years ago. They began calling the house “Hopeprint,” based on the idea that everyone had unique hope, like a fingerprint, that they brought to the world. The house had one rule: If you met a new person, you had to invite them to dinner.

As the collective became a full-fledged nonprofit in 2010, family dinners happened every Tuesday. The door is open and there’s never a shortage of food. At one point, Watts, who is barely over 5 feet tall, stood on a chair and counted the heads. There were more than 90 refugees and New Americans and 30 others who had come to help and learn.

This was family, too.

‘It’s a community effort, through and through.’

Watts is the oldest of four children. She lived in Northern Virginia until fourth grade and then moved to Colorado. She went to college in Chicago, where she graduated with a degree in youth ministry. Watts parents were both ministers.

Dustin Watts, Nicole Watts’ younger brother, remembers her always leading.

When they were little, Nicole would stage Christmas plays with her younger siblings.

“She’d get us all costumed up,” recalled Dustin Watts, who is seven years younger. His sister would choreograph dance moves. She never made her little brother dance, but even then, her power to get people to see things her way was clear.

“She had this persuasive spirit where everyone just kind of falls in line,” Dustin Watts said.

Nicole WattsNicole Watts with her younger brother, Dustin Watts.Provided photo

As he and his sister have grown up, she’s become someone he confides in because she won’t hold back when she doesn’t agree.

“She thinks seriously about things,” Dustin Watts said. “She doesn’t shy away from, like, the tough stuff that makes a good person to confide in.”

He works in computer security, but also has a tea company with his wife called “Thereabouts.” His sister’s travels and experiences with the people of Syracuse’s Northside have helped shape the flavors they offer.

Dustin Watts and his family came to visit Nicole this fall during the campaign. They came to one of those dinners at her Northside home.

Nicole’s day was packed, Dustin said, and dozens of people were going to show up in less than an hour. Nicole’s response: Don’t worry. I can do this in 15 minutes.

She began to cook and she knew that others would come with more. They arrived not to be served, but to be part of it. Some people cooked. Others served. And when it was all done, people cleaned up as if jobs had been silently assigned.

“It’s a community effort, through and through,” Dustin Watts said.

A short, impactful year

Nicole Watts’ new job is another extension of how she takes care of her community. Her term is only a year, which means she has to move fast to make an impact. She’s been thinking about it since she said “yes.”

It starts with ensuring that those who have the least, like the majority of the people in the neighborhood where she’s embedded for more than a decade, stay at the center of the government’s work.

That means economic development should focus on helping those who are struggling. Watts has her eye on Plan Onondaga, a land-use plan the county adopted to focus development efforts during the expected Micron boom. The plan identified the city’s Northside as a target for development, and Watts said she wants to make sure that the people who already live there don’t end up getting pushed out. Instead, they should benefit the most.

“It’s a difficult, a very, very difficult line to walk,” she said.

She also has lots of questions about what the county is doing to protect its immigrant and refugee communities as ICE crackdowns increase and target wider swaths of people.

“The county has the ability to choose whether or not they are being helpful to ICE,” Watts said. “I want to make sure they’re choosing to protect our people whenever they can.”

Watts said she plans to return transparency to the decisions that county legislators make. That will range from budget hearings to committee meetings about problems within county government. For instance, Watts said, she wants to better understand what happened when two children died while under the care of Onondaga County Social Services.

“We have to have somebody who’s being the voice for our community in these really important conversations,” she said.

Watts said she’s realistic about where the power is. though. Even though she and other Democrats oppose the aquarium project, it’s already under construction. They can’t stop that.

One thing she’s committed to is making sure departments present to the committees that oversee them at least once a year outside of budget season. That small change could dramatically improve transparency, she said.

Watts begins her term Jan. 2 and is eager to make one of the shortest legislative terms in county history one of the most influential.

“It’s one incredibly important year,” she said.