As a Black feminist, mother, scholar and child of immigrants, I have sought and continue to seek out opportunities to be of service to and build with others the world I'd like my daughter to inherit-- one where all people are valued, seen and supported. As a philanthropic strategist and storyteller, these identities and their multiple intersections inform my work and my commitment to dismantling the oppressive systems that create harm and to telling the stories that explore the nuance and diversity of our encounters with these very systems and the lives we imagine outside of them. I attempt to create the world I’ll pass on to my daughter in every interaction, every relationship, every story and every strategy.

I began my career at age 19 with the big idea of using literature and storytelling as tools for exploration for girls in the foster care system. That impulse and body of work turned into a Washington DC organization, Damali, Inc. Damali operated for two years forming a multi-generational community of women and girls that supported the education of vulnerable youth. However inexperienced we were in that first experiment in social change, I learned invaluable lessons that thread through my professional and educational career. First, gender matters. Second, girls' work must be anti-violence work. Finally, our stories have the power to free us.

Burned out but still idealistic, I thought I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to volunteer in Pacuarito de Limón, Costa Rica. There, I learned Spanish and how to properly gossip over cafecito thanks to my wonderful host family. I also facilitated leadership programming for girls, taught Spanish to indigenous women and helped young women who had been sex trafficked find independence. Experiencing life in a different culture, I witnessed more commonalities than differences in the ways young women are socialized and the ways gender inequalities are reinforced and recreated. Upon my return to Washington, DC, I served as Director of Community Education for the DC Rape Crisis Center (DCRCC), nation’s oldest rape crisis center. It was at DCRCC that I formalized my training in the field of sexual violence becoming convinced of the unfortunate truth that doing girls work means fighting to end sexual violence.

I left DC to attend graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City and also serve as Outreach and Training Manager at the Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) where I trained and supervised survivors of commercial sexual exploitation as they took on leadership roles in the movement. At GEMS I developed peer education programs with young people who needed to take their natural affinity for social justice work and turn that into skills that would allow them to contribute to the movement and to further their own careers and independence.

Throughout my studies, I worked in community-based organizations with the intention of relating what I learned in the classroom with what I learned from communities. At the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women, I founded and managed for seven years a youth program designed to meet the educational, developmental, leadership and college readiness needs of young women from West Africa. In this work, I also engaged in advocacy and research on a host of issues that include early and forced marriage, violence against women andy girls, and educational access for English Language Learners (ELLs).

While working in community-based organizations, I earned both a Masters of Education (EdM) and Doctorate of Education (EdD) in International & Transcultural Studies Teachers College, Columbia University. My dissertation, entitled In Pursuit of Success: The Educational Identities and Decision-making of African Girls with Limited Formal Schooling utilized African feminism to examine how immigrant girls with limited formal schooling navigate American schools, and make decisions about college and marriage. I also co-authored an article in the November 2012 Global Studies Journal (Volume 4, Issue 4) entitled (Re)Framing African Immigrant Women’s Civic Leadership: A Case Study of the Role of Families, Schooling and Transnationalism.

This body of work primed me to begin work in philanthropy. I started at the NoVo Foundation barely understanding what philanthropy was and the role it could play to resource the brilliant minds, committed hearts, and culturally rooted strategies to end patriarchal violence and racial injustice. During my 5 years with the NoVo Foundation, I had an opportunity to build relationships with girls and women in the United States and the Global South and resource their life’s work and hearts dreams. As Program Officer for the Advancing Adolescent Girls’ Rights Initiative, I am proudest of what my colleagues and I made possible by being audacious in our funding strategies and by trusting movements.