Nicole Brown on abundance thinking, the invisible industry, breaking barriers to belonging, and why curiosity might be the most radical act available to the water sector right now.

Nicole Brown has spent 27 years at the intersection of community, equity, and water infrastructure and she has arrived at a moment of deliberate forward motion. As Area Growth Lead for the Water Sector at GFT and founding Vice President of the Black Water Professionals Alliance, she brings a perspective that is at once deeply practical and genuinely visionary. When she drew the Curiosity card in this episode of Meaningful Conversations, it opened a conversation that ranged from abundance economics to generational trauma, from the Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia to the hidden career paths that an entire generation doesn't know exist.

What runs through all of it is a single conviction: the water sector has been telling itself the wrong story, and it is time to write a better one.

"Curiosity leads to knowledge. I don't want to be stuck right now. I want to generate forward motion in myself so I can be an active generator for the people around me."

The scarcity story — and why it costs us

Walk into almost any water conference and within minutes you will hear it: there is not enough funding, water is not valued, we are fighting for resources. Nicole does not dismiss any of this - the pressures are real, and the funding gaps are genuine. But she is making a deliberate choice not to let that story become the default operating mode.

The inspiration comes in part from Robin Wall Kimmerer's book The Serviceberry, which makes the case that our economy has been structured around scarcity, competition, and hoarding and that this structure actively harms what we most care about. The alternative it offers is an economy oriented around gratitude, reciprocity, and community. For Nicole, reading it felt like a clarification.

Our thoughts, she argues, are always generative. The question is whether we are being conscious about what we are generating. A scarcity mindset produces scarcity-shaped decisions - hoarding, siloing, defensive postures that protect what exists rather than building what is needed. An abundance mindset asks different questions and reaches for different solutions. And when it comes to water, Nicole points out, the case for abundance is right in front of us: the water on this planet is the same water that has always been here, cycling and returning, and the astonishing work of the water sector keeps it clean enough to drink. That is not a story of scarcity. That is a story of stewardship.

"The water that is here is the water that has always been here. That same drop has to be protected - it has to go through these processes to get back to you. When children understand that, something shifts."

The invisible industry — and the value hiding in plain sight

The water sector, Nicole observes, has done a remarkable job of making itself invisible. For much of modern history, that invisibility was a status symbol - if you did not have to think about where your water came from, it meant someone else was managing it for you. The infrastructure worked so well, so quietly, that it disappeared from public consciousness entirely.

The cost of that invisibility is now significant. People have become disconnected from their water - from what it takes to deliver it, from the complexity of treating and returning it, from the basic fact that the water in their glass has a long and careful journey behind it. When things go wrong, that is when people notice. When things go right, every single day, they do not.

Nicole's response to this is not frustration but engagement. She talks to children about water regularly. She speaks at churches. She connects people to the reality that clean water from a tap is an extraordinary achievement requiring constant human skill and care. The goal is not complaint - it is awe. And from awe, she believes, comes the kind of civic investment and community stewardship the sector badly needs.

Building the Black Water Professionals Alliance

Most people Nicole encounters in her daily life have no idea that water is a career. The sector has done such a thorough job of running invisibly that it has also become invisible as a place to build a life's work. For communities already facing systemic barriers to professional opportunity, that invisibility is particularly costly.

The Black Water Professionals Alliance, which Nicole founded in Philadelphia, exists to change that directly - engaging those already working in water to do more active outreach, and meeting communities where they actually are, not where the sector assumes they should be.

• Career visibility: Showing the next generation that water is a rich, varied, and meaningful career space
• School engagement: Getting the water cycle into curricula - every stage is a job, a person, a career
• Digital presence: Going where young people actually get information - including TikTok and social media
• Community connection: Tapping into existing community networks to plant ideas and open conversations

In Philadelphia, the historic Fairmount Water Works - a former pumping station opened in 1815, now a museum and environmental education centre - welcomes around 30,000 students a year and introduces them to the history and living reality of water. Nicole's vision extends further: a floating water workshop where urban young people, many of whom have never learned to swim, can get on the water, touch it, feel it, and begin to form the connection that makes stewardship possible. Drowning rates among Black populations in the US are disproportionately high. Fear of water, passed through generations, has disconnected entire communities from one of the most restorative resources on earth. That is a barrier worth dismantling.

"Once you are connected to water — once you have been in it and felt its restorative power — you become a steward of it. That connection is where everything starts."

Pushing from the inside — safely and strategically

Nicole is, by nature, a rule-follower and she says it without apology. Not because she accepts every rule uncritically, but because she knows that understanding a system is a prerequisite to changing it. As a Black woman in a sector that has not historically centred voices like hers, she has learned that strategic disruption - shaking things up so they get better, not breaking them - is both more effective and more durable than pure opposition.

This is not about individual advancement. It is about collective evolution. Nicole's framing of social and institutional change is one of dissolving rather than destroying - consciously moving away from structures that no longer serve, rather than tearing them down. Old constructs, she argues, do not need to be demolished. They can simply become part of an old story as new ones take their place.

The vision that replaces them cannot belong to one person. It has to be built collectively, rooted in something more compelling than the status quo - more curious, more abundant, more connected to the actual humans the water sector exists to serve. That is the only vision with enough pull to generate real momentum.

Abundance and reverence — holding both

One of the most resonant threads in this conversation is the question of how to hold abundance and protection together - how to believe in the expansiveness of what is possible while remaining clear-eyed about the responsibility to safeguard what exists. Nicole's answer returns to the word stewardship, and to the idea that reverence and abundance are not opposites. They are deeply connected.

To be in awe of something is to want to protect it. To understand that water is life - that human beings are approximately 70% water, that civilisations have always gathered around water, that every ritual of cleansing and renewal in every culture involves water - is to have a reason to care that runs far deeper than a billing cycle or a regulatory obligation. That kind of care is what sustains a sector through the hard stretches. It is what the water industry needs more of, at every level.

"Abundance and reverence are connected. When we understand that water is life — truly life — then protecting it becomes something we want to do, not something we have to."

Nicole Brown is wiring herself, deliberately and consciously, toward a new story for water - one rooted in abundance rather than scarcity, stewardship rather than invisibility, and belonging rather than exclusion. It is not a vision of one person. It never was. But it needs people willing to be the first ripple, to start something so that others can join. In this conversation, it is very clear that Nicole is already in the water.