Nicole Pittman is the Executive Director of the Just Beginnings Collaborative.
She has spent over a decade challenging youth registration and notification laws. Prior to her current role, Nicole served as a Stoneleigh Fellow and Director of the Center on Youth Registration Reform at Impact Justice, where she worked to eliminate the practice of placing youth on sex offender registries in the United States. As a 2011 Soros Senior Justice Advocacy Fellow at Human Rights Watch, she interviewed hundreds of individuals raised on registries across the country to document the abuses that stem from subjecting children to sex offender registration laws. In 2013, Human Rights Watch published the results of her work in Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US. The report features first-person narratives that illustrate the harrowing treatment of children, as young as eight years old, who have been subjected to lifetime sex offender registration and public notification. She has provided testimony to thirty states and the U.S. Congress.
Nicole also worked for seven years as a Juvenile Justice Policy Analyst attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia and as an attorney at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, the New Orleans Public Defender’s Office, and the New Orleans Pro Bono Project. Nicole is the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Contribution Award presented by the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers and the 2010 Robert Shepherd Jr. Leadership Award of Excellence in Juvenile Defense presented by the National Juvenile Defender Center.
Nicole holds a BA in history from Duke University and a JD from Tulane University Law School.
