Nancy Leedberg dedicated 28 years to serving the City of Brockton, Massachusetts, as a Police Officer, spending the majority of her career in school-based community policing as a highly respected School Resource Officer (SRO). Her deep commitment to youth development, early intervention, and community engagement shaped her work across the district and the region.
For five years, Nancy served as the Brockton Police Department’s Community Education Officer, where she created and delivered safety, prevention, and wellness programming for students, educators, families, and police personnel. During this time, she founded and directed the Brockton Police Youth Academy, a leadership-based program for middle school students designed to introduce them to the culture of law enforcement while fostering trust, confidence, teamwork, and essential life skills. Under her leadership, the academy became a cornerstone youth initiative, completing 15 sessions, serving hundreds of Brockton students, and continuing today as a valued community program.
Nancy’s passion for early intervention and trauma-sensitive practice guided much of her work. She helped develop innovative programming for children exposed to traumatic events and became the department’s first therapy-dog handler. In this role, she integrated a trained comfort dog into crisis response, school-based support, and classroom lessons, helping students regulate emotions, build resilience, and re-engage with learning following traumatic experiences. She also helped shape school safety and youth-policing standards across New England, serving for 15 years on the leadership team of the region’s largest SRO conference.
Nancy also served as a National G.R.E.A.T. instructor, training departments and officers across the United States. She facilitated training for 5th graders in her district and served on the committee to revise the G.R.E.A.T. Families curriculum (with Brockton becoming the national model). She was a regional trainer for the ALICE active-shooter response program, empowering schools and community members with proactive strategies to survive violent threats. She delivered hundreds of presentations, including NotMYkid, a strategy to prevent drug abuse in teens, and helped pioneer a ride-along initiative with social workers and clergy to assist struggling students and their families in her community. She is also a graduate of the Warrior PATHH program and a former member of her Regional Peer Support Team, supporting first responders during periods of personal and professional stress.
She holds degrees from Bridgewater State University and Curry College and has been recognized with numerous community and national awards for exceptional service. Nancy is currently working on publishing her first children’s book, which highlights the trauma-sensitive use of therapy dogs in school settings. Her wellness practices which include swimming, paddleboarding on Newfound Lake, reading, and meditative hikes with her dogs reflect her lifelong dedication and personal commitment to resilience, healing, and thriving, not just surviving. She also praises the efficacy of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), recognizing its powerful role in supporting trauma recovery and post-traumatic growth.
She joined Struggle Well in 2023 soon after her law enforcement retirement, initially as a guide, but found a way to continue her passion for serving others as Logistics Manager by organizing and scheduling classes and supporting her team and the New England Director of Struggle Well, expanding the reach from Massachusetts into the other New England states. Of all her assignments, she feels she has found her own ikigai (the Japanese concept of “reason for being”) and a path to longevity and happiness in serving the Struggle Well initiative.
