In our March 2025 HUE Newsletter, we celebrate Women’s History Month and are thrilled to feature Lincoln Bacal. Lincoln is a brilliant young woman and quite the powerhouse. She is a nonprofit co-founder, community organizer, and facilitator. As Director of People & Partnerships at Bridgemakers—a youth-led nonprofit she helped launch—she’s facilitated millions of dollars of investment into young entrepreneurs and their businesses, innovative education practices, and emergency COVID aid for Minnesota students. Drawing on expertise in organizational leadership, youth development, and policy advocacy, Lincoln specializes in working with diverse perspectives to design transformative and community-centered solutions. Outside of work, she serves on the boards of several Minnesota nonprofits, co-leads a cross-sector youth-services collaborative, and facilitates a community of practice on political diversity.
In 2020, as a high school senior, Lincoln lost both of her food service jobs when COVID struck, only to learn that a Minnesota law disqualified high schoolers from receiving unemployment benefits. Thousands of students faced choosing between dropping out to access aid or staying in school and risking homelessness. This inspired Lincold to help organize an intergenerational coalition of students, nonprofits, small business owners, and other allies to push for legislative change. In 2021, the group secured over $30 million in emergency unemployment relief for high school students and changed the law to guarantee future benefits.
Lincoln is now twenty-one years old, and over the last eight years, she has dedicated herself to creating pathways for other young people to be public leaders in Minnesota. She co-founded Bridgemakers at the end of 2020 alongside two young leaders with whom she worked closely during their unemployment campaign. Bridgemakers is a youth-led organization cultivating young people to transform youth-serving systems. Their origin is in promoting youth civic engagement and preparing younger generations with the skills they need to be leaders in our public institutions. When asked what her biggest learning or takeaway from her experience co-founding “I’ve convened thousands of community members and my greatest takeaway has been the sobering hopelessness, apathy, and disengagement from community that my generation is experiencing. Bridgemakers has become more essential than ever; our work transcends division, such as partisanship, ethnicity, gender, and age, as we run two core leadership development programs for youth–one focused on policy and civic leadership, and the other on entrepreneurship.” Outside of the Bridgemakers team, she supported the creation of another youth-led nonprofit, and regularly uses her facilitation skills to help young entrepreneurs cultivate their businesses.
In addition to her work in the nonprofit space, Lincoln has also been able to study participatory facilitation with HueLife and is on the path to becoming a Technology of Participation Certified Facilitator. As part of her journey, she will be a part of the 2025 Mastering ToP Cohort with HueLife.
