Nicole Vassilico – 2024 Dispatcher of the Year

Like many of our volunteers, Nicole’s journey with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep starts with a single baby. She was living in a military community in Arizona when a friend lost her 21-week-gestation baby. A NILMDTS Affiliated Photographer came by to take photos of the baby, and Nicole had the chance to speak with her. Nicole had just started dipping her toes into photography herself, taking pictures of lightning. Her conversation with that NILMDTS photographer changed her photography goals, though. She decided she wanted to give that gift to other families, so she leaned in to learning techniques that would prepare her to serve. 

“It took awhile,” Nicole reflected, laughing, “But I did it!” 

Nicole became an active NILMDTS Affiliated Photographer in early 2021. The part of Texas her family lived in at the time, though, did not allow external guests into the hospitals as part of their COVID precautions. Still wanting to help areas that could get into their local hospital facilities, Nicole quickly signed up to serve as a remote dispatcher. As a remote dispatcher, Nicole worked to connect families and medical staff looking for services with NILMDTS volunteers in her area. In the years since, she’s dispatched for NILMDTS photography teams in Salt Lake City, Boise, and Denver, sometimes serving multiple areas at once. Nicole described her work as a dispatcher as “trying to find the creative ways to make this work for the people I’m dispatching …