Kelly Stewart Nichols, Principal
Kelly is Principal and co-founder of Woollard Nichols Torres Consulting. Under her leadership, WNT has become a leading sustained collaboration consultancy in Central Texas, working with nonprofits, government agencies, foundations, coalitions, and cross-sector partnerships to build the relationships, structures, and capacity needed to create lasting change.
Kelly brings particular expertise in designing and facilitating complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives where no single organization can solve the problem alone. She combines systems thinking, data, storytelling, and a deep understanding of group dynamics to help partners move from conversation to shared strategy and collective action.
Her recent work includes leading the development of the first-ever Austin/Travis County Food Plan, a community-driven roadmap for creating a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient local food system. Kelly served as lead author of the plan and has continued to support its transition from planning to action through the development of the Food Plan Implementation Collaborative, bringing together community, government, nonprofit, and other community partners to advance shared priorities.
For more than a decade, Kelly supported the Austin/Travis County Reentry Roundtable, helping strengthen the local ecosystem of organizations and agencies working to improve outcomes for people returning to the community after incarceration. As part of that work, she spearheaded a collaborative process to develop new community guidelines for the inclusion of people with criminal backgrounds in subsidized housing, bringing together housing providers, people with lived experience, reentry organizations, and other stakeholders to address a longstanding barrier to successful reentry. WNT ultimately transitioned its role with the Roundtable to leadership by people with lived experience - an outcome that reflects a core goal of WNT’s approach: building the capacity, relationships, and structures that allow collaborative efforts to thrive without WNT’s ongoing involvement.
Across her work, Kelly is particularly interested in what makes collaboration sustainable: how groups build trust, share power, make decisions, use data, navigate conflict, and create structures that allow collective efforts to endure beyond a single project, grant, or leader.
Before co-founding WNT, Kelly worked across the nonprofit, higher education, business, and public sectors, including serving as Planning and Policy Manager for the City of Austin’s Housing Department. That breadth of experience continues to inform her ability to work across organizational and sector boundaries.
Kelly is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A Missouri native and longtime Austinite, she remains a city geek at heart and rarely passes up the chance to explore an open-air market in a new city.