GIRLS, UNLIMITED
Also
by
Monique Couvson
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Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-!rst Century
Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls
Cultivating Joyful Learning Spaces for Black Girls: Insights into Interrupting School Pushout
Pushout: e Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
Charisma’s Turn: A Graphic Novel
GIRLS, UNLIMITED
HOW TO INVEST IN OUR DAUGHTERS
WITH MORE THAN MONEY
Monique Couvson
© 2025 by Monique Couvson
All rights reserved.
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Published in the United States by e New Press, New York, 2025 Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
ISBN 978-1-62097-947-1 (hc)
ISBN 979-8-89385-000-0 (ebook) CIP data is available
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Allison Ranelle Brown (1976–2020) And all of our daughters
We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful. We realize that we are, ourselves, unlimited, and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.
—Alice Walker
INTRODUCTION
Girls are the yolk.
—Nikki Giovanni
Istudied her face like I’d studied her poems. Sitting across from me was renowned author, educator, and poet Nikki Giovanni— whom I call Dr. Nikki—and I was thrilled. In 2022, I invited her to have a conversation with me about why society should invest in girls.1 My vision was inspired by the intergenerational conversation she once shared with the cultural essayist James Baldwin on live TV in 1971, where a then twenty-eight-year-old Nikki Giovanni pressed Baldwin, her elder by nearly twenty years, on a host of issues regarding the conditions in, and collective mindset of, Black America.
A !er watching that interview many times, I understood the value of intergenerational conversations recorded for viewing decades later, and I wanted to re-create the experience. Dr. Nikki had been my favorite poet since the mid-1980s, when I discovered her work. For decades, I admired her ery spirit and powerful words. I loved that she always advocated for youth—even tattooing “THUG LIFE” on her forearm as a nod to the infamous tattoo that rapper Tupac Shakur had inked onto his stomach in the 1990s. As he expressed then, THUG LIFE was an acronym for “ #e Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.”
#e phrase was a critique of the structural and personal violence youth experienced, which negatively impacted society as a whole. When Tupac was killed in 1996, Dr. Nikki got the tattoo to let Tupac’s mother, former Black Panther Afeni Shakur, know that her pain was shared.
“I knew it was a sad thing to lose your child,” Nikki once told an interviewer. “I just wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.” 2
I loved that an elder could “see” us—Generation X and our parents—so clearly and go so far as to replicate our art as protest. In one gesture—replicating Tupac’s tattoo—she not only let Tupac’s mother know that others were mourning with her but also ampli ed Tupac’s critique. It cemented a special place in my heart for her.
As we sat across from each other, I looked at her petite face, adorned with freckles and beauty marks on her cheeks and around her eyes. #ey revealed the passing of time, even while her eyes bounced with the same curiosity and challenge on full display in the videos recorded in her youth. As she slowly shi !ed in her chair, her small emerald studs sparkled under the lights. Her demeanor was relatively reserved: she listened intently to me when I spoke, nodding in agreement or shaking her head with disagreement or clari cation at di $erent points in our conversation. She had just turned eighty years old, and I was ! y, so we both had some distance from the youth we had come together to discuss. #e intention was not for us to presume consummate knowledge of the current plight of youth but for us to discuss how we, as adults, could support our girls. We had spent more than ninety minutes together, talking about how stories are passed between generations, a discussion that included laughing and teasing each other about the foods we’d prepare and eat as African Americans. We talked about the importance of libraries and the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a metaphor for girls’ nding place in society and the value of grandmothers as peacekeepers. She mused about
her love for astronomy, what she called “the stars,” and the power—or irrelevance—of one’s name or racial identity on Earth. According to her, beings in other worlds would just call us “Earthlings,” so there is no point in harming people or alienating ourselves because of di $erence.
When it was time for our conversation to end, I asked, “What can you leave us with on this idea of investment and investing in girls? Why do you think that’s important?”
She tilted her head and took a breath. #e glasses she had placed on the top of her head clung securely to her so! , curly Afro.
She stared into my eyes and with authority said, “Well, girls are the yolk . . . and I’m not against the white, because the white is there for just one reason: to protect the yolk. And so, if you’re a yolk, you have a reason to expect that the white is there to look a !er you. And your job, then, is to do whatever the dream is, whatever it is that you’re doing.” 3
Her analogy of adults as the albumen that protects an egg yolk was powerful to me, and a useful metaphor for how adults should approach working with girls. She placed girls at the center by referring to them as “the yolk,” the delicate core of an egg. But more than a clever play on words—especially since girls are born with their lifetime supply of eggs—it was an a % rmation that children born biologically female have all they will need to host the reproduction of all human life. While the physical ability to host and grow human life is not the only measure of what makes a child a “girl,” I found her invitation compelling. As the albumen, adults have one job: protect them. Nourish them. Ensure that girls have the room to grow.
It was a complex idea presented with great simplicity. Girls are the yolk. If we protect their ability to realize the potential they were born with, we sustain their ability to birth futures that impact all of us.
Since 1987, I have been an author, an educational advocate, an educator, a researcher, a public intellectual, a lmmaker, an artist, a philanthropist, and, most important, a mother. Specically, I began my educational advocacy when I was !een years old. As a high school student in San Francisco, I immersed myself in an educator-preparation program. # roughout high school and college, I honed my pedagogical practices and research skills, and produced scholarship and programming that explored the unique policies and practices impacting the wellbeing of Black communities and youth. By the mid-1990s, in graduate school I was keenly aware of the reach of the criminal legal system and began to more deeply explore the conditions of systems-involved young people—youth under the age of eighteen who were impacted by the juvenile court and child welfare systems. My research grew to include advocacy and a deep commitment to articulate the conditions impacting young people. # at commitment included sharing the stories of young people who were disproportionately harmed by institutions and beliefs in our society so that they could be seen as more than just “numbers.” As an educator, researcher, and author, I was able to function as a translator of sorts, as a trusted purveyor of information between worlds that touch, but that rarely communicate e$ectively. # is is a responsibility that I have taken seriously, and one that I share throughout this book, as it informs my worldview, my advocacy, and my leadership. Each experience has produced its own lessons about the unique conditions of girls. #ese lessons inform my understanding of what it will take to robustly invest in our girls and their unlimited potential. My lens is shaped by several critical understandings that inform my ongoing commitment to our girls. #e rst critical understanding is the importance of intersectionality in exploring and discussing the conditions of our girls. Intersectionality is a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to
describe how the combination of each person’s identities— including their race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and so on— inform all of their interactions with people, institutions, and policies.4 # is concept acknowledges that no one ever has only one identity. It acknowledges the laws, protections, and other ways that institutions interact with us at the intersection of our multiple identities. Early on in my own life, I understood that I was both African American and female, which informed how I was experiencing the world around me. When it comes to naming the speci c harms that impact our girls and developing the remedies, intersectionality is a critical tool. Misogynoir, the term scholar Moya Bailey coined in 2008 to capture the intersections between race and gender that subject Black women to a unique type of hatred, vitriol, and prejudice, is a perfect example of why an intersectional lens is so essential when determining how to robustly invest in our girls.5 My experiences with and study of misogynoir inform my best thinking about how to invest in our girls in ways that don’t simply provide them with strategies to survive dangerous futures.
As president of G4GC, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic intermediary organizations focused on resourcing organizations and movements that center the wisdom and well-being of girls and gender-expansive youth of color,* I have worked with an incredible team of advocates, philanthropists, and other coinvestors in the well-being of girls to frame the second critical
* A philanthropic intermediary organization functions to connect donors (foundations, individuals, and corporations) with organizations and movements that receive these funds. Intermediaries may regrant funds and provide other supports in alignment with their mission. G4GC’s mission is to support transformative organizing work in the United States and territories (Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam) centered on an infrastructure that re&ects our values, a culture of partnership, healing, reciprocity, and love.
understanding that informs this book: our goal must be the liberated futures of our girls. 6 Liberation requires freedom from conditions of harm. #erefore, a liberated future for our girls is a future that is unobstructed, allowing them freedom in thought and behavior. It is the deliberate and intentional act of cultivating futures for our girls in which they are able to actualize their dreams because of the signi cant investments we make. Girls’ futures should be informed by love and our commitment to build structural, social, emotional, and community infrastructures that explicitly consider and support them. #eir futures shouldn’t hinge on their extraordinary resilience under oppression.
In this book, informed by my personal re&ections and experiences, I share recommendations for how we can invest in girls to actualize their liberated futures. I also share data and conversations that illustrate how we, as a society, can collectively “protect the yolk.” # is e$ort is like jazz—an improvisational, yet syncopated tone to my personal narrative in a call to action. It includes stories from my life and interviews with many of my friends and colleagues, women—some high-pro le, some relatively unknown to many—who have shaped much of the contemporary political environment to support the well-being of girls. Overall, this is an invitation to adults to invest by “looking a !er” girls in a host of measurable and tangible ways. Most people hear the word “investment” and immediately think of nancial investments—and that’s important. But nancial resources are only one way that we can secure liberated futures with and for our girls at the intersection of their identities; they are but one strategy to ensure our girls’ potential is unlimited.
Starting with the concept of knowing, I a % rm why it’s important for girls. As adults who work with girls, it is important to explore their multiple ways of knowing—and to explore the impacts of these extended epistemologies (the study of how we know what we know)—in our collective work to invest in their
well-being. I start here because it’s essential to start investing in girls by teaching them the value of their voices and their unique, intuitive understandings. I share insights from interacting with my daughter and talk to my friend sociologist and Episcopalian deacon Bertice Berry about how to recognize knowing as an opportunity for investment.
I move on to discuss the importance of supporting girls’ purpose once that knowing is in place. Once girls know, they know, and we cannot take that from them. Our minds and how we spend our time are two of our biggest assets as human beings. Adults are charged with helping girls nd their purpose. I share how I discovered my purpose, and how it was supported in the early stages of my life and career.
Next comes an exploration of the structural barriers to girls’ success, how to dismantle them, and how to teach girls to have a structural analysis about the world around them. I include excerpts from a conversation with Joanne N. Smith, the CEO of the groundbreaking nonpro t organization Girls for Gender Equity, in which we discuss the development of a national policy agenda for girls and how girls’ understanding of policy shapes their ability to actively participate in this democracy. We also discuss a strategy for those who work with girls to ensure that the girls are able to o$er more than symbolic presence or tokenism for “youth perspectives.”
Next, I explore why protecting girls from gender-based violence is an essential investment in cultivating their ability to realize their purpose and dismantle structural barriers. I share my personal experiences in research and advocacy for girls in this arena, and I include excerpts from a conversation with Tarana Burke, founder of the #metoo movement on why treating gender-based violence as a public health issue is an important investment in girls’ liberated futures.
#en I discuss how education and mentorship are essential
investments in girls, re&ecting on the key lessons from my work to end school pushout for girls and how my own experiences with mentorship inform my core beliefs about mentorship and education. I discuss how girls are shaping our understanding of educational issues, as well as how investing in girls’ education and mentorship is a critical lever for personal growth and their ability to advocate for social policy improvements across a spectrum of issues. I include re&ections on how I was mentored, along with notes from two of my own mentees. #ese are meant to o$er transparency about how mentorship has shaped me and how we, as adults, should intentionally mentor girls and young women.
Finally, I acknowledge that while the non nancial investments are important, money still matters. # is section describes my work at G4GC, and how we were able to build an infrastructure to support more than four hundred girls-serving organizations in their e$orts to build liberated futures for girls at the intersection of their identities. # is section also explores how money is moving— or not—to girls in ways that are transformative. It outlines how we can include girls in decision-making within philanthropy and across the culture of charitable giving in ways that re&ect our belief in the promise of our girls.
Ultimately, this book is a call for adults to use their greatest gi ! s—their time and their minds—toward the liberation of all girls. Framing investments only in nancial terms places the onus of “investing” solely in the hands of those with an abundance of nancial resources, when the truth is that investing in our girls is the work of more than just the wealthy. Investing in girls is not about taking resources away from socalled primary issues. My approach to producing research and other scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and philanthropy—which I describe in the chapters that follow—has always been about ensuring we are reaching all children in an inherently and de antly patriarchal social structure. Because ours is a patriarchal society,
the measures of success will almost always default to those that involve and impact men and boys. But our e$orts to support girls do not require us to take resources aways from boys or anyone else. It’s about recognizing the value of a population and its very centrality to the issues we describe as “important.” Girls’ issues are not stand-alone issues. #ey are not subsidiary or auxiliary. #ey are primary. Girls’ issues are economic issues. Girls’ issues are public health issues. Girls’ issues are educational issues. Girls’ issues are climate justice issues. Girls’ issues are democracy issues. Every issue is a girls’ issue.
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