Jared C. Nicholson

Jared C. Nicholson (born December 3, 1985) is the 59th Mayor of the City of Lynn, Massachusetts.

Early life and education
Nicholson was born on December 3, 1985, in Framingham, Massachusetts to Stephen and Lindsay Nicholson. He is a Sudbury, Massachusetts native and attended Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, graduating in 2004. He went on to graduate from Princeton University summa cum laude in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in 2008. He earned his Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2014, where he was Executive Director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Nicholson is bilingual in English and Spanish.

Career
Nicholson received the Skadden Fellowship out of Harvard Law School, and designed, launched, and led a new community economic development practice in Lynn, Massachusetts. Here he represented underserved communities in entrepreneurial and small business legal matters. He also helped make recommendations adopted by the Lynn City Council to support economic development in the city. In 2016 he was elected to the Lynn School Committee, serving three two-year terms. During that time, he helped develop a new initiative for students across the district to learn job skills after school, and founded the city's wrestling team. Since 2016, Nicholson, who wrestled at Princeton, has hosted a beach wrestling tournament every summer to support Lynn wrestling. Prior to being elected Mayor, Nicholson worked as a business lawyer for startups at Latham & Watkins and later as a law professor at Northeastern University, where he worked with and researched small businesses. He stopped teaching once elected as Mayor.

Mayor of Lynn
In 2021 Nicholson was elected mayor of Lynn defeating City Council President Darren Cyr in all 28 precincts of the city. The Mayor also serves as the Chairperson for the School Committee for Lynn Public Schools. One of Nicholson’s first accomplishments in office was to reform the City’s development process, working with the City Council, to allow for a more coherent and coordinated review by City officials. The streamlined process soon yielded a historic contribution by a developer on a major project to affordable housing. To implement his Administration’s goals for affordable housing, Nicholson created an affordable housing trust fund with the City Council. Property tax relief programs for senior citizens were also increased early in Nicholson’s administration. In his first year in office, Nicholson delivered on a campaign commitment to deliver inclusionary zoning, working with the City Council, that was calibrated to encourage continued growth while also creating affordable housing for Lynn residents.

Nicholson has made the conditions of Lynn’s schools a top priority. To alleviate overcrowding, Nicholson is leading a multi-year process to build a new middle school. He has also focused expanding access to quality pre-K education, with Lynn Public Schools adding a significant number of seats for the 2023 school year. The schools also opened the Frederick Douglass Collegiate Academy on North Shore Community College’s campus, a pioneering partnership between the Lynn Public Schools and North Shore Community college that gives high school students the opportunity to attend college-level courses at no cost to them while still enrolled in high school.

Nicholson has pushed to bring good-paying jobs to Lynn and connect Lynn to the region’s innovation economy, achieving an upgrade in MassBIO’s designation of Lynn’s readiness for life sciences growth from bronze to platinum, bringing a high-tech manufacturer with over one hundred jobs to Lynn’s downtown, and working with the City Council to rezone key parcels to facilitate job growth.

Nicholson has led an effort to improve language access to city services for multilingual residents, hiring a team of interpreters. He has announced plans for the City to launch an independent, unarmed crisis response team to address mental health needs and further racial justice. The schools have dramatically increased their mental health support for students through the hiring of social workers and clinicians. Nicholson has also sought to increase the availability and utilization of lifesaving Nalaxone as part of the efforts to combat the opioid crisis as the City has experienced a promising downward trend in opioid overdose deaths.

Nicholson has also focused on improving the City’s infrastructure, including streets, parks, litter, and a new senior center, as well as financial stability, attaining a credit rating upgrade from Standard & Poor’s from A to A+. Nicholson also led the creation of the City’s first comprehensive plan, “Vision Lynn.”

Personal life
Nicholson lives in Lynn with his wife, Katherine, and their sons, Henry and Benjamin.

Nicholson has a younger brother.