Testimonials About Our Work

I’m a recent graduate of GULC, class of 2021. One of the best parts of my Georgetown experience was my time at the Center, which I joined as an RA after my 2L year. During my time at the Center, I researched and wrote on a variety of issues, including School Resource Officers, school discipline, adultification bias, and restorative justice. The Center gave me an opportunity to hone my legal research and writing skills while focusing on issues related to girls of color, and provided me with a model of how legal research and advocacy at a research institution can impact local efforts and engage with those communities while uplifting and centering the voices of GOC and their lived experiences.

The most meaningful part of my G’town experience was working with the inspiring lawyers, scholars, and partner organizations who work with the Center, as well as the youth advisors, who make the Center special.

If I think of the 10 years of this work [on marginalized girls], a word that comes up is ‘visibility;’ [and] thinking about the problems of girls in a world that’s been so much about boys. It’s come from an idea, and it’s grown and become nationally known.

I am incredibly grateful to the Center for their report, “Girlhood Interrupted.” Often, we talk about Black girls from the anecdotal lens, and that’s critically important. We need to hear the voices of Black girls, and that’s what the Center does. It elevates those voices, but then it marries that narrative from Black girls who’ve been impacted with data and with qualitative and quantitative research.

The Center’s work over the past decade has been profoundly influential. It has influenced courts and has been cited in opinions repeatedly. It’s influenced scholarship—the amount of times its research has been cited in books and articles is incredibly striking and in a way that really is stunning. It’s also influenced popular discourse. It’s really a model of the kind of engaged scholarship that we encourage at Georgetown Law and is at the heart of what we do. I applaud everybody involved in the Center and what they’ve done over the past decade, and I can’t wait to see what they do in the years ahead.

To me, being a part of the Center on Gender Justice & Opportunity at Georgetown Law has allowed me to help others, specifically girls and young women of color like myself. The Center has gifted me with the opportunity to listen to others’ stories and then advocate for them on issues pertinent to our communities. I say this and I mean it: the Center has changed my life. I wouldn’t be where I am, mentally or physically, without it. I was given a gift: to help other girls of color fight issues like mental health at the same time that I was dealing with my own mental health struggles. I found my voice and a purpose. I found a passion and a sense of belonging. I am forever grateful to Rebecca Epstein and my fellow advisors for creating a welcoming, safe environment and for working day in and day out to speak up for people.

As the Center’s first Storyteller in Residence while in my senior year of high school, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from the Center. Working with the Center gave me a different outlook on advocacy. At first, I looked at it as a sport because I had been on the debate team since middle school. But working on different projects with the Center has shown me how storytelling affects people and how powerful words are. It’s been an honor to work with you, and it’s instilled so much in me throughout the journey!

Critical pieces of research coming out of the Center on Gender Justice and Opportunity at Georgetown Law have been instrumental to my academic endeavors and my development of self. Throughout my years at Brown University, the reports “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood” and “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story” helped unveil the unique drivers of Black girls’ incarceration… The accessibility of the reports … made them easy to reference, navigate, and share among my academic peers. And the reports helped put language to many of the experiences I witnessed in my own Black girlhood. These reports are validating and allow so many Black girls to feel seen. This kind of work coming out of the Center is the impetus for change — especially for those whose stories are not fully told.

Working at the Center, I was able to see firsthand the impact the Center has on the girls we work with. From providing policy recommendations to high-ranking White House staffers to speaking before law school audiences, the Center’s programming offers invaluable opportunities for girls and gender-expansive youth of color to gain the skills and confidence necessary to be powerful advocates. The Center fully utilizes the breadth and depth of legal analysis to positively impact the lives of the individual girls we work with while also influencing broader policy conversations. Working at the Center after college motivated me to further my own education and attend law school with the intention of pursuing a career dedicated to the expansion of rights for marginalized communities.

I joined the School for Girls of Color’s Youth Advisory Council because I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to learn about topics affecting young people of color and be a part of a group of people that look like me. I’ve been able to learn about something I had never even heard of before, improve my public speaking skills in a setting that was previously unfamiliar to me, and help to create a way to advocate for young people dealing with reproductive injustice.