Nicole Cardoza is a magician and storyteller. Her shows have been featured at the Chicago Magic Lounge, Liberty Magic, Soho House and the Brooklyn Museum, and she has toured the U.S. three times. She is working on a documentary about Ellen E. Armstrong and the role of stage magic in Black womanhood.

Nicole founded Reclamation Ventures, home to Anti-Racism Daily, Magically Me and Learn. Anti-Racism Daily reaches more than 300,000 readers and has raised an estimated $2.5M for causes. Reclamation Ventures has given nearly $1M in grants.

She is the author of the children's book Mindful Moves, and she has lectured at MIT, Harvard and Stanford.

In 2014, I started an organization called Yoga Foster. It began as an after-school yoga program at a couple of schools on the Lower East Side and grew into a national organization that gave schoolteachers the tools and resources to bring yoga and mindfulness into their classrooms. With support from corporate funders like CorePower Yoga and lululemon, our partners at Let’s Move! Active Schools, our participation in the Camelback Ventures fellowship, the 260 yoga studios that held donation-based classes and thousands of everyday people passionate about making a difference, we scaled to support over 2,500 educators in 500 schools across 39 states. In 2019, we took a converted 33-foot school bus on tour to yoga studios and festivals, collecting resources and donated yoga mats for classrooms along the way.

We renamed ourselves Wellemental in early 2020 and shuttered shortly after, following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which came at a time when I was already planning to step down as executive director. We’re grateful to the organizations that have since absorbed our resources and curriculum, and we’re thrilled that we did our small part to advocate for accessible, quality movement and mindfulness in lower-income public schools.