Monique Couvson Wants Society to Better Understand Black Girls

Monique Couvson was at Columbia University working on her master’s thesis on residential juvenile correctional facilities when her interactions with the young people in those centers led her to a realization: “Education is the foundation for everything.”

“When I walked into that juvenile detention center and I met with the girls that were there, I realized that there was very little difference between me and them, and the critical difference between us was that I had education and I had other tools to express my discontent,” says Couvson, now the president and CEO of Grantmakers for Girls of Color (G4GC), a philanthropic intermediary that invests in the leadership of girls and gender-expansive youth of color.

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Couvson, 52, has three decades under her belt as a scholar and criminal-justice advocate dedicated to studying and countering the criminalization of Black girls in schools, and she works with what she calls a “participatory worldview.” What that means, she explains, is trying to center the views and desires of the communities she works for. For instance, through speaking to young people of color, she learned that while many of the young leaders she was working with did identify as girls, many identified as gender expansive. 

“Here was a fluidity to gender that we felt was important for our organization to represent and to reflect,” Couvson says. “I would hope that any philanthropic body or any other organization would also seek to be a learning institution, because there’s power in knowing and there’s power in bringing in a collective way to explore very complex issues.”

In just four years with G4GC, Couvson has helped convene 100 funders from the U.S., moved more than $26 million to 400 organizations, and developed four signature funds: the Black Girl Freedom Fund, the New Songs Rising Initiative for Indigenous Girls, the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign, and the Holding a Sister Initiative for Trans Girls of Color. 

“It’s about our young people being able to step into that leadership and in those capacities on their own, not in a tokenized way, not in a way that is exploitative or extractive, but in a way that honors their brilliance and leans into means to trust them and their wisdom in this very critical moment that impacts their lived experiences,” she says.

In 2014, Couvson founded the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, which works to interrupt school-to-confinement pathways for girls and reduce the barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated women. She noticed that no institution was dedicated to examining data specifically about how Black girls and women are experiencing the carceral system and how they might experience justice. “So I founded it,” she says.

But she knows organizations alone are not the answer. So over the years, her work has taken many forms: public speaking, documentary film, a novel, a graphic novel, a book of statistics, a nonfiction book. She loves when students and fans don’t just experience her work—like Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools or Charisma’s Turn, a fictional account of a Black high school student navigating school and family life—but respond to it.

“My favorite thing is when people come to see me at a book talk or at a lecture and their pages of Pushout are scratched up [with] ears on the page, and they mark it up, and they’re working with it, and they have questions in the margins,” Couvson says

Her goal, she says, is to reach diverse audiences about the conditions of society that uniquely affect Black girls. “I believe that in order for us to be transformative, in order for us to really move the public consciousness to the place where they begin to understand some of these really big concepts that are sometimes very academic and divorced from how people actually talk, you have to talk to multiple people at once,” she says. “You can’t just talk to policymakers or just talk to law enforcement, you have to also talk to the community.”

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