Alum Spotlight
Founder and Principal
Nicole Tisdale has more than a dozen years of civic participation and national security experience at The White House, the U.S. Congress, the 2020 presidential transition team and the Mississippi Innocence Project. She most recently served as a key senior advisor on the President’s National Security Council (NSC) and previously on the House Committee on Homeland Security. As the director of legislative affairs at the NSC, she led the White House’s legislative and oversight portfolios on issues of cybersecurity, intelligence, disinformation, counterterrorism, election security and foreign policy developments for the western hemisphere.
As a congressional staffer, Tisdale actively created, managed and assisted the homeland security committee with more than 96 congressional hearings and the passage of 354 bills through the House of Representatives. She also represented the U.S. on official delegations to more than 35 nations to discuss and negotiate a range of policy issues.
After a decade on Capitol Hill, she founded Advocacy Blueprints in 2019, where she worked with individuals and organizations who were eager to accelerate policy issues and increase advocacy efforts to create changes in their communities. To help advance civic education and participation, Tisdale wrote and published a book, Right To Petition, to help others exercise their First Amendment right to advocate.
Before her time in Congress, Nicole, a native of Nettleton, served in a number of bipartisan and nonpartisan policy and political fellowships and internships. She is also one of the founding board members of the Washington, D.C. Ole Miss Club. As a former government and social studies substitute teacher and liberal arts tutor, Nicole continues to volunteer with advocacy and education groups.
After completing her time in the Biden-Harris administration in April 2020, Tisdale returned to her training and consulting startup, Advocacy Blueprints, and is focused on scaling and building civic participation workshops and national security awareness campaigns related to disinformation and cybersecurity.