Dr. Joyce McNickles is a social justice educator and consultant with over thirty years of experience developing and executing comprehensive cultural competency, racial equity, and inclusion initiatives in academic, corporate, and non- profit settings. She is the founder of McNickles & Associates, a consulting practice which provides individualized coaching and mentoring for executive leadership, conducts staff trainings, and helps organizations facilitate difficult dialogues related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other aspects of diversity.
She is Visiting Professor of Politics and Social Justice at Regis College. Formerly, she was Professor of Human Development and Human Services at Anna Maria College where she taught courses on diversity in the workplace, social inequality, racial equity and social work, multicultural education, and sociology. She has been visiting faculty at Worcester State University, Westfield State University, and Emmanuel College.
Prior to teaching in higher education, she served as Program Director for the National Conference for Community and Justice where she created and facilitated workplace diversity training programs for corporations, public school districts, colleges and universities, and state and local government agencies. Dr. McNickles has authored chapters in several editions of the widely used business management textbook Understanding Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises, published by Prentice Hall. She has presented papers on black identity development and its intersections with other social identities.
In addition, Dr. McNickles has a demonstrated commitment to health equity. For several years, she was an invited lecturer on Implicit Bias in Health Care for first-year medical students in The Social Determinants of Health course at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and served six years on their Institutional Review Board. She has also chaired the Capacity Building and Training Sub-Committee for the Worcester Partnership for Racial and Ethnic Health Equity. Dr. McNickles created a breast cancer awareness workshop specifically for African American women and has facilitated several sessions in the community. For that work, she was recognized by Worcester Magazine as a Hometown Hero in 2019.
Community Service
Dr. McNickles is strongly committed to social justice and equity, which is reflected in her community activism. She was the 2016 recipient of the City of Worcester’s Eleanor Hawley Award for Human Rights and the 2019 recipient of the YWCA’s Erskine Award in the field of education.
She previously served as a board member and secretary for the American Civil Liberties Union (Worcester County Chapter) and was a member of the Massachusetts Commission on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth for three years. She served on the board of the YWCA of Central Massachusetts for six years, where she co-founded and co-chaired the Racial Justice Task Force.
In addition, Dr. McNickles served on Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s Advisory Council on Racial Justice and Equity from 2016-2023.
She holds a master’s degree in social justice from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a doctorate degree in adult education (focusing on social justice) from National-Louis University.