Abolitionist Sanctuary
Join Founder and Executive Director of Abolitionist Sanctuary, Rev. Nikia S. Robert, Ph.D., in a podcast about Black women/mothers, religion, and mass punishment. Connect with us to be apart of a faith-based abolitionist movement!
Abolitionist Sanctuary
Investing In Black Girls: From Pushout To Possibility
What changes when we treat girls as sacred rather than disposable? We sit down with Dr. Monique Couvson —scholar, author of Pushout, and leader of G4GC—to map how schools, policies, and everyday assumptions push Black girls toward punishment instead of possibility. From her roots in San Francisco and the wisdom of ancestors to a clear-eyed analysis of data and discipline, she shows how faith, research, and philanthropy can work together to build learning spaces where belonging is the default and healing is the norm.
We explore the core idea of pushout: the policies, practices, conditions, and prevailing consciousness that heighten contact with the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Dr. Morris explains why Black girls are overrepresented at every disciplinary decision point, how adultification bias and sexual violence histories shape outcomes, and why carceral language in schools—detention, infractions, zero tolerance—primes children for future harm. Her answer isn’t a softer version of punishment; it’s a different paradigm: restorative approaches with structure, culturally grounded social-emotional learning, and a commitment to schools as locations for healing.
You’ll also hear how participatory research reframes power by recognizing participants as co-keepers of knowledge, and why the “righteous mind” matters for real learning—inviting students to bring their whole selves, question boldly, and practice discernment. We connect these insights to philanthropic strategy and community design, highlighting Girls Unlimited and funds that resource Black, Indigenous, and gender-expansive youth of color. The through line is agency: when we invest early, honor lived experience, and expand our collective imagination, justice stops being a pie to slice and becomes a garden we grow.
If you care about education justice, restorative practices, and ending the criminalization of Black girls, this conversation offers both clarity and a blueprint. Listen, share with an educator or policymaker, and then tell us: what’s one carceral habit your community is ready to replace? Subscribe, leave a review, and join us as we build a faith-based abolitionist movement grounded in repair, relationship, and real safety.
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Welcome to the Abolitionist Sanctuary Podcast. I am your host, Reverend Dr. Nakia Smith Robert. I am excited to bring to you this episode with our special guest, Dr. Monique Koofson. Dr. Monique Koofson is formerly known as Monique Morris. She earned a doctorate of education at Fielding Graduate University and two additional degrees at Columbia University, where she is the former student of the late and legendary Dr. Manning Maribel. Dr. Koofson is an award-winning author, social justice scholar, and philanthropy executive with nearly four decades of experience in the areas of education, civil rights, juvenile, and criminal justice. Dr. Kufson is the president of G4GC, a premier philanthropic intermediary focused on resourcing movements and organizations that center the wisdom and well-being of girls and gender-expansive youth of color. Under her leadership, G4GC has developed four signature funds, including the Black Girl Freedom Fund and the New Songs Rising Initiative for Indigenous Girls, the Holding a Sister Initiative for Trans Girls of Color, and the G4GC's Love is Healing General Grant Making Fund. Since June 2020, G4GC has granted more than$28 million to more than 400 organizations located across all 50 states, including Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico. Dr. Coopsen is the author of seven books, including Push Out, The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, and her latest, Girls Unlimited, How to Invest in Our Daughters with More Than Money. Her book, Charisma's Turn, was named by the American Library Association as one of the best graphic novels booths for teens. Dr. Koofson is executive producer and writer for the documentary short film in Conversation, The Power of Imagination, which features a discussion between Dr. Koofson and the world-renowned poet Dr. Nikki Giovanni. She is also an executive producer and co-writer of the NAACP Image Award nominated documentary film, Push Out, the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, currently streaming on Amazon Prime and other platforms. In addition, Dr. Koofson's 2018 TED Talk on how to stop the criminalization of black girls in schools has received over 2 million views and has been translated into 20 languages. Dr. Koofson was recognized by Time as a racial justice closer in 2025 and by the Route 100 as one of the nation's most influential African Americans in 2022. Dr. Koofson is on the advisory board of the California Black Freedom Fund. And she in 2012, she was a Soros Justice Fellow. She is the former vice president for economic programs, advocacy and research at the NACP, and the former director for research at the Felton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley Law School. Dr. Cooson work has been profiled by Forbes, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, MSNBC, C-SPAN 2, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, USAT Today, and PBS, among other national and local media. Her research intersects race, gender, education, and justice to explore the ways in which Black communities and other communities of color are uniquely affected by social policies. She's also a lecturer on the life and legacy of the artist formerly known as Prince. And if I may put a plug in myself, she is also a member of the illustrious Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated, my dear sister and sisterhood scholarship and service. Welcome to the show, Dr. Coofson.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much. Thank you for the city.
SPEAKER_00:It's wonderful to have you here.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. It's always interesting to watch what happens inside of my body or to be aware of what happens inside of my body when people read my bio and start talking about the things I've done and the places I've been. So I am deeply honored to be in conversation with you and excited to have this conversation.
SPEAKER_00:You are indeed a trailblazer and one of my She Ros. So as we begin the show, please tell us your pronouns and give us a visual of how you're presenting in this space for those who are unable to see you. And tell us who are your people.
SPEAKER_01:Who are my people? So I am Monique Koofson and I go by she, her pronouns. I am today wearing a sleeveless turtleneck, beige in color with a head wrap that is a brown, beige, and black and white, tortoiseshell glasses, so I can see you, and little Delta Pin because you are in such beautiful Delta attire. I had to join you a little bit in the celebration of our sorority. My people come from the South, and they are from Texas and Louisiana. We're part of the migration west. So I'm a Californian. The story is that people of African descent went westward looking for opportunities, looking for engagements. My grandpa, T. D. Koofson, was a longshoreman in San Francisco. And so I am part of the community of San Franciscans. I'm a second generation San Franciscan. And so a lot of times people don't think about the black people who were born there and who birthed there. They only think about the tech industry that sort of moved there. But I am part of the community of people who know San Francisco from a time where we could grow and live and learn, amongst other people who were coming westward for opportunities and engagement with the indigenous people in those communities to build out new ideas about identity and community. And so that's who I am.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much. I visited San Francisco shortly after the Eaton Canyon fires with my family, and it just gave me the feel of home because it felt so similar to New York City, where I am from.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it is kind of similar. I left San Francisco and went to New York and felt perfectly at home.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I am presenting myself with a string of pearls, four layered pearls with an Oxford collar with a red sweater with the Greek letters for Delta Sigma Theta, and wearing some uh blonde boho braids and a full beat face with a red lipstick to match my red sweater. My people to hail from North Carolina, and we are proud to have migrated to Harlem, where I call home. So again, thank you for being here. I would love to jump right into this interview and ask you some questions. You mentioned who your people are. Can you share more about your ancestors and the significance of ancestral wisdom? Which ancestors do you carry with you? And why is their wisdom significant for your formation?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I carry those ancestors who are both uh related to me directly and those who come and inform my thinking and my engagement around a host of things. I'll start with my grandma, who was a source of love in my life, Katie Anna Kusin, or Katie B. Kusin. My mother is named Katie Anna Koosin. She is an elder now but engages in constant conversation with our ancestors and movement. My last name, Kusin, you know, most people know me by Morris, but I carry Kusin intentionally with me now because I wanted to ensure that the folks whose fiery spirit and engagement around resistance to oppression are centered in my knowing and engagement in the work that I do, and that the work that I do traces back to their questions, back to their experiences, back to their love, back to their challenges. And so I remain rooted as a Kufsin. And so it's been an interesting journey to engage with them. I also have just gotten to know my biological father as an ancestor, and so that has been an interesting experience for another time and another conversation. But it does deeply inform how I bring my full self to all the inquiries that I have. Manning Maribel, I love that you included him in the intro. It's not a formal part of my bio, but he is absolutely an ancestor that I bring with me and that I have tried to introduce through this project of Girls Unlimited, but also through other projects to people who may not be familiar with his work, with the core instruction that he left with me as one of his students, and somebody who I feel very privileged to have been able to sit at the feet of in real time. And so these are just a few of the ancestors that I carry with me, but certainly the political ancestry of Mary McLeod Bethune and other strong black women who dared to ask questions and dare to engage in the development of solutions as it pertains to a host of political issues, but rooting that knowledge of how they engage in these political issues in the experiences of Black girls. So excited to bring them into the room.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for that. I also am intentional about including Smith in my name, not as a hyphen, but to pay homage to my mom, who was a poor single black mother and who to which I owe so much. And so I keep her name present as a way to honor her as an ancestor as well. You mentioned a lot about faith and purpose. Can you share with us how the two inform your divine assignments?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you know, Girls Unlimited, unlike the other projects, really gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I come to this work, how I came to understand that there was an issue I wanted to be involved in or a set of issues I wanted to be involved in, and what informs my understanding. In the book, I talk about sacred inquiry, I talk about knowing, I talk about things that invited me to have a deeper conversation about what informs my knowing. And I'm very clear that it has been more than just the books I read, although that's a big part of it too. It's really been about like the experiences I've held, the core foundations of recognizing spirit, of me, you know, going to church with my grandparents all the time. But when I was there in their home, it was an open conversation about God. And I think over time, as people start to engage in their learning, sometimes we start to have the conversation about God over here, and then the conversation about purpose and learning and knowledge over there. And so for me, with Girls Unlimited, it was an opportunity for me to become a whole person in this discussion again and to explain and explore how it is that I came to understand my divine assignment, what I call my divine assignment, right? The assignment that I feel I was called to do that God placed in me, that there is this way that my mother has often encouraged me to be connected to spirit and connected to God so that I'm clear about the steps that I take, but also my relationship with God as it informs what I do and how I process information and how I understand the moment. And so, as a personal practice, I've always had a belief and understanding that the higher power guiding me was so much bigger than the issues that people told me were too big to address. And therefore, I was, I won't say fearless, but I had confidence that I could enter a space and understand that it would have some form of impact because it was what I believe I was called to do, and that I was protected in doing it. And so I think those are some of the things that I try to call into this book because often when we're talking to girls about their sense of knowing, we tend to talk to them about, we tend to talk to them about everything but God, right? We talk to them about recognizing the conditions in their community and not so much anchoring in how they understand their higher calling and their purpose and their spirit and what the community then has to do to protect them and and guide them along that journey. So it's an opportunity, I think, in Girls Unlimited for me to explore why it is that I was able to walk into certain rooms that were hostile toward me, that I knew were hostile, but still feel protected, and also how I come to engage in my own recovery from those spaces because I have a deep connection around my sense of knowing and my belief that I am walking in my purpose when I do what I do.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. Walking in the purpose makes all the difference. I remember I started my career on Wall Street and I worked there for about 10 years in investment banking and public accounting, and I wanted to get my MBA. And I took my GMAT, applied to all of these graduate programs, and I didn't get accepted anywhere. And then the spirit was pulling me toward ministry. And so I quit my job at Citigroup. I applied to seminary and I got accepted everywhere from Ivy League schools, you know, Yale, Princeton, and eventually accepted at Union Theological Seminary. It means the world of difference when you say yes to God. And as a Sunday school teacher, that's something I was very adamant about teaching my children purpose, right? To this day, I look back on those children who are now adults, and many of them are in the fields and careers that they named as 15-year-olds. So it's important to speak that life and affirmation, uh, to order your steps, to be purpose-driven. So thank you so much for that.
SPEAKER_01:You know, you mentioned Sunday school, and I think it's one of the early learning opportunities for people. You know, for me, you know, I don't talk about this in the book, but you know, the first song I learned was Yes Jesus Loves Me, right? And so it was one of those early reminders that you are held by something greater. And that was important for me to experience because I'm an early survivor of a lot of things. And because I understood that there was a spirit that was holding me, I knew I could recover in a very specific way. And it just grew my relationship with God, but it grew my relationship with my family. And I think it allowed for me to tap into an empathy that has guided my work ever since. And so it's not even, you know, just about the work per se, right? It's about the communities we live in, the people we invite into our space, and how we come to interpret, you know, just the energies around us. And, you know, I love that this is a chance to finally talk about some of that stuff because I've said little things, I've dropped little nuggets in books like Push Out, where I'll say young people experience energy when they walk into a classroom and they know if you care or not. This is a chance to be more explicit around the fact that as young people, we are spiritual beings. We are very close. And so because we are very close to that divine spirit, what we do to children, how we engage children is essential for mapping out how they understand their purpose and how they walk as as and grow into their adulthood. I love the example around like early instruction and early engagement around some of those things because I know it was instrumental in my own understanding of what was possible in my life, as long as I understood the location of my power and whose I was.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And to counter the voices that tell us that we're not worthy, right? I remember an eighth-grade teacher telling me I would never make it, right? And so having that spiritual encouragement and edification that we get in many spaces, but for me in the Black church, right, to affirm us against a society that seeks to crush us and tell us we're unworthy is powerful. And I really like that framing around empathy, because if we understood that we all are endowed with a purpose, right, perhaps we are more inclined to see each other's humanity, right? You mentioned in your book, the African village, that says when someone is born, it's like, well, how are they going to contribute? What is their purpose? What value are they gonna add to this village? And so there's an anticipation and excitement to covet the life and nurture what's inside of them as opposed to destroying them. So it's really powerful. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I really appreciate the connection to your faith journey. You are also an activist scholar and in your research. So why has participatory research methods have been important for your scholarship and work with women, uh, particularly women who are incarcerated?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's really where Manning enters the space. As a student, you know, I always knew that I wanted to explore the lived and living conditions of black people. I was a double major at Columbia in political science and African American studies. And I used to say, poli sci is, you know, what people want to see you major in at Columbia, but I'm doing African-American studies to feed my soul. And so as I was feeding my soul with African American studies, I crossed paths with, you know, a person who was able to nurture and grow very critical questions on how we come to understand, how we engage in some of the ways of knowing and how we make sure that they're rooted in not just the truth that we determine based upon what we observe, but the actual lived experiences of people who are at the center of the inquiry. And so taught me very early on that if I wanted to do research about anything, but especially if I wanted to engage in research that examined black people, that I needed to talk to black people and I needed to be in community with black people, which is what fed my soul. And so I started to approach research and approach research methods through this lens of centering the population that is most impacted by the inquiry. And so the way that I sort of moved out of just, you know, sort of African-American studies with that engagement and into other disciplines with that practice really came from leading empirical research while I was at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. And I just had an opportunity to ask very specific questions that then led to the work that I was doing at the Discrimination Research Center. But my work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and girls really, I think, demanded that we have conversations about their experiences because people rarely talked to them. And that was the first observation I made when I was in grad school and went to go visit Spofford, which was a juvenile detention facility in the Bronx. And I realized that one of the critical differences between me and the girls in that space that are is now torn down, thankfully. But one of the critical differences was just that I had other tools to be able to express my pain and to recover from my pain. And they did not. And I also realized that nobody went to go visit the girls. And it didn't matter if I was in Hawaii or in Ohio or in New Jersey or in Florida. I could always go on to the little wing that is the girls' unit and not see anyone visiting them. And so there was an isolation that was occurring that would foster, I think, an ignorance about their experience. That I was determined to be a part of the solution for, because you don't remedy that which you don't understand to be an issue or a problem. And you don't recognize it as a problem unless you're actually asking questions that will lead you to an understanding of it as a problem. And the only way you get there is if you talk to folks. As I started to build out my own practices around how we would develop recommendations for incarcerated young people or how we would address racial disparities across the juvenile court continuum, it was really important for me to center those who are at the center of the inquiry. And that really grew from that work. It also, though, gave me, you know, an opportunity to talk about how we cultivate new language and new understandings. So it was a fascinating way, I think, for me to also stay connected to an issue that I cared about, but also to the emergent brilliance of people who find themselves in isolation in some of the most egregious circumstances. It was a time to explore all the things, and you only got there if you engaged in the participatory work that I was engaged in first initially through academic exercise and then leading it myself when I was developing recommendations for policymakers.
SPEAKER_00:I really appreciate that. I am now in the place in my own research that an academic press has accepted my book project. The research is calling me toward participatory methods, which is expansive. I do critical analysis. I'm not an anthropologist, an ethnographer, but there's a certain integrity where the spirit said to me, the right thing to do here is to hear from the people closest to the issue and have them guide the research. And, you know, because uh women who are incarcerated are protected and because of the vulnerability, it adds time to the research that delays a pub date, you know, publishing the book, but it's necessary. And so, you know, just trying not to get deterred in that process of participatory research methods and collecting oral histories. Thank you for modeling that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, it's just critically important to understand. I keep saying when I finally have time, I want to write a whole methods piece about why it's important to bring your whole self to the inquiry and why we were taught to and conduct research, you know, in ways that privilege the modalities that serve white supremacy. And so it is important for us as emergent scholars, as established scholars, and as ongoing scholars to have the conversations about what forms knowledge, who are the keepers of knowledge. I never refer to people who participate in my studies as human subjects. They're not subjects, they are participants in an inquiry. And it's important to shift that lens and engage because how you treat what they have to offer is determined by how you understand their capacity to hold knowledge. And so through all of the books that I've produced, there has been this intentionality around making sure that folks understand who is holding the knowledge, who is involved in the inquiry. I name names. I've been saying that my books are often love letters to people in the field and people who do this work with me. And I name names because it's important for us to document who is holding this institutional knowledge, but also who is holding this community knowledge and this emergent knowledge, right? You know, the nerd in me wants to go in deep around that, but I love that you're continuing to explore this notion of what can constitutes participatory engagement. Because oftentimes people will call things participatory that are really just ad hoc committees, right? And it's not really a serious engagement that centers the wisdom of the impacted communities.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And for me, it's also a womanist method, right? And honoring the living texts of women and their experience. And often I get the feedback from those colonial spaces that this isn't academic enough, right? And so when we talk about knowing and epistemologies, is the ways in which women has prioritized the, you know, the epistemologies of black women as living texts is really important, the interiority of our lives. Thank you so much. I look forward to your methods book. You have been in this space for decades. And, you know, talk about patriarchy. You mentioned the isolation of the women at Smartford. Talk about the patriarchy and national discourses about the criminal system. For example, one of the responses you received from your essence article about black girls in prisons from a guy was quote, where do you get the nerve talking about girls when there are so many black men locked up? End quote. So why is it important to talk about girls and women who are among the fastest growing population in prisons?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, you named it because they're the fastest growing, because we haven't located them. And we continue to sort of set them aside, thinking that we can prioritize our communities out of, or that that patriarchy or patriarchal uh strategies should be prioritized as we seek liberation. When I've been saying for a very long time that our communities are sharing a collective experience around surveillance and incarceration and its spiraling impact into our communities, that schools, I you know, I entered this conversation around criminalization very explicitly with girls with push-out, because when we started to have conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline, we were missing all of these different ways that other young people were experiencing criminalization. And where young people were experiencing harms that we just weren't mapping because we weren't looking at them and we weren't engaging a lens that was wide enough to capture their experiences. Using the carceral framework will privilege the conditions of men because men are disproportionately overrepresented among those who experience incarceration. But when we talk about criminalization, then it opens it up a whole lot more for us to understand number one, the reach of the carceral system, the reach of the criminal legal system into our families, but also that it allows us to see the different institutions and the functions that they play in determining the life trajectory and status with the criminal legal system that so many in our communities experience. And so when I got that note from that fortunate brother, I was like, that's unfortunate. But it was also a note to me that, like, okay, maybe there's more that needs to be said here. And that was in 1998, right? I wrote that piece in 1998. And so there was not this big explosion around what was happening with our girls. It was one of the first articles to say, you know, hold on, girls are on lockdown too. And I mean girls, right? So these are gonna be girls who grow into their adulthood, having had this experience of being on lockdown. And so, what does that mean for their life experiences? What does that mean for their economic well-being? What does that mean for their capacities to care for families and build out their own well-being? All these things, especially when you think about the fact that they were entering these systems because of these very, very intense histories with sexual violence, as victims of sexual violence, as survivors of sexual violence and physical harm. That you know, women and girls who are in touch with the criminal legal system and juvenile court system almost always have a history of that kind of violence. And because domestic and intimate partner violence is such a routine part of the story, along with the push out story, it leads us into a deeper understanding of how we develop interventions for our community to be well. I was always one of those folks that said the investment in men and boys is a necessary investment. So I go on the record all the time saying that the investments we make in men and boys is necessary. And it cannot be made to the exclusion of the investments we make in women and girls. And so as we think about people across the gender spectrum, as we think about people across the age continuum, we have to explore all the different opportunities for us to be as specific as the interventions call us to be, and as broad as our community needs us to be, to build out solidarity and allyship and community such that we can be well as a people, as a community, as a human race, right? Like, so this is it feels big, it feels uh utopian in some minds, but not in mine, because again, my sense of knowing is that once we come to understand that there is as much justice as there is possibility, then we know there's no limit to it, right? We think of justice as a pie to be divvied rather than something that grows in infinite possibility if we imagine it to be so. And so this is as much about mind shift or mindset shift as it is about increasing our own very specific capacities to be able to locate girls in these conversations, locate young women in these conversations, and then invest robustly in their well-being so that they grow into adults who can also be well.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. So we talked about the omission and overlooking of girls in prisons shaped by patriarchal systems. Talk about how you respond to that with your book Pushed Out. What interventions do you provide when looking at the criminalization of black girls in school and the school-to-prison pipeline?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of issues. First, when I talk about push out, I'm talking about the policies, practices, conditions, and the prevailing consciousness that facilitate an increased likelihood of young people being in contact with the juvenile court or criminal legal system. And when you think about the policies, practices, conditions, and prevailing consciousness, right? So what we think about girls, black girls in particular, that renders them vulnerable to future contact with these systems, it invites us to unpack all the different ways that we can, or all the different locations along the continuum and points of decision making that inform how they end up where they are. Over the years, I have seen that a lot of the patriarchal views about girls will sometimes lead to cage and save them tensions, where girls get locked up because they feel like locking them up is the response to the harms they experience in the street, as opposed to really thinking about the structural harms that facilitate the likelihood that they will be in communities where the streets even are functioning to cause harm in their lives. And so all of my projects have been about dialing it back so that we can start to locate the source of harm and systems and really begin to understand what young people need to be well, what adults need to heal in order to facilitate homes where young people are well, then we will continue to see these cycles. So with push out, it was really about doing a deeper dive around how black girls are disproportionately experiencing harm. So it was the place where I was able to talk about the fact that black girls are the only group of girls who are disproportionately experiencing exclusionary discipline in schools from you know the earliest stages on through high school, right? And that they are the only group of girls who are experiencing disproportionate overrepresentation at every decision point that has to do with discipline. And it doesn't mean that other young people, other girls are not experiencing harm, but black girls were the only group of girls who were experiencing it this way, placing them in the same pool as boys. So in some jurisdictions, the degree to which young people were experiencing exclusionary discipline was in ranked order, black boys, black girls, other boys, then other girls. So the racial disparity was so egregious among girls that they were showing up among boys. And that's unusual. Usually you don't see that. And because you don't see that, not to excuse, you know, that that boys are there, because that's another inquiry, but because you girls were showing up with boys, there was a specific way that I wanted to explore how are black girls being masculinized? How are black girls experiencing sexual harms and adultification or age compression, as I talk about it in push out, that render them vulnerable to some of the decisions then that have to do with discipline or that have to do with other placements? How do we understand these conditions so that we can locate them even in some of the historical narratives about black girlhood, right? Why do we call her too loud? Why are we calling her fast? Why are we saying these things? And how have black girls been primed to accept their own victimization or to accept their own harms and then to act it out later on in life? And so with Pushout and with Singer Rhythm Dance of Blues, I really wanted to invite us into conversations about how we understand this issue, how we understand the triple consciousness of being Black American female, how we understand what that means for how girls are negotiating and navigating systems, and then what we can do in educational and other learning spaces to interrupt those cycles? How can we develop interventions that locate Black girls and other girls of color in conversations about well-being? What are some of the things that people are doing? How can social emotional learning be more culturally relevant and competent to be able to respond to some of these things? How can restorative approaches be more structured to understand the various modalities that girls are using around healing and repair of relationships? These kinds of things were very important to me alongside just having a structural engagement and analysis around how schools are functioning to prioritize responding to punishment or to responding to student dysregulation with punishment rather than really doing other things that invite us to a conversation around healing. And so that's where I've come to this conversation around schools as locations for healing, largely informed by the work that I was a part of in the Bay Area at a school that I founded in partnership with several other organizations to respond to girls who had experienced push out so that we could continue to grow in our understanding and learning about how to disrupt these cycles of violence in girls' lives, but also just how we love on our children. How do we get engaged in spaces that allow us to demonstrate that our investments in girls are not because of who they may partner with or who they may birth in the future, but because they themselves are worthy. And that's been a lot of the work, and that's been a lot of what informs even Girls Unlimited when I talk about education and mentorship and opportunities for us to really see girls in conversations about social policy or locate girls when we're having our systems and structural analyses so that we can design interventions that are appropriate for them.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for that. I wish we could bring you to my children's school. My children attend an independent school that still has a detention system, which they think the reform is now moving to an infraction system. And there are a lot of independent schools in our consortium that still has this detention model. Personally, I don't think anything in schools should resemble the technologies of prison. I would much rather instill in children an awareness of how they cause harm and the conflict resolution and problem-solving skills to execute values of how to be better people, how to make better decisions in order to develop them as more productive citizens, as opposed to just throwing them away in the corner, they're missing recess. I mean, all that reproduces the harm, right, according to studies. Can you share with us, if you were talking to an independent school K through eight and maybe even K through 12, what would you say about the harms of push out, adultification, punishment, and detention systems? And what interventions or alternatives would you point them to in terms of a case for restorative justice as a response to harm?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I rarely walk into a school with a cookie-cutter approach because I know, again, one of the strongest indicators of there being a system like the one you just described is an understanding or a belief by the school leadership that young people recover from dysregulation or misbehavior with greater discipline. You have to listen to the words people use. And if the leadership of a school is more inclined to think that law enforcement and discipline is how you correct student misbehavior, they're more likely to engage in exclusionary practices. If the leadership of a school is inclined to understand that interventions and having a full continuum of alternatives to the use of exclusionary discipline is how you reach young people and give them opportunities to set their own either self-regulation or to develop relationships that inform how they can respond when they are upset and more likely to develop those things. And so what I would do is invite the schools that still have these antiquated methods of engaging with young people that are not rooted in the best practices of that have been determined by research on how to reset student behavior is to invite them to do an assessment and invite them to have a conversation about what the outcomes of these decisions are. Oftentimes you'll find that when you have a mapping of the outcomes, it's really about whether the educator or the adults in the school feel like they are comfortable enough to continue on with what they feel they've been tasked to do. And they have little to do with whether young people actually feel safe. The conversations that I have held with young people invite us into a different set of conversations because they're measuring safety differently. They're thinking about safety as their ability to certainly to learn, but certainly also feel connected to community. They want spaces that allow for them to make mistakes, but also recover from those mistakes. The kids, I say this all the time that kids who are young people who are disruptive or deemed disruptive in schools are young people who have experienced disruption. And so until we have a clear understanding of what is causing the disruption, you really won't get to why they're being disruptive. And so when young people are experiencing disruption, it's important for the school to develop a set of, you know, sort of partnerships or responses that allow for there to be some care and recovery around the disruption. I've said for a very long time that schools have to be more than schools, teachers have to be more than just teaching the subject matter. You have to be a location for young people to feel love in a specific way so that they can engage with you with trust and they can facilitate their healing and often sometimes the healing of their families. So often it starts with mapping and it starts with data collection and it starts with conversation. Once you've done those three elements of like a phase one engagement, then you start to realize what is missing, what are, you know, what you said they move to an infractions model. You know, again, modeling the language and spirit of carceral systems does not serve us well. It just primes young people for future contact with these systems. And so it's important to think about. How we offer remedies and opportunities for healing when we're working with young people, because that's what young people's brains need. That's what young people's hearts need. And responding to young people as if they are little adults is the very thing that I've been writing about as problematic for a long, long time, for decades. It does not result in sort of early identification of harm or early identification of a future trajectory of harm. It results in us priming young people to facilitate even more harm or to deepen the harm they've already experienced. And so this is the prevailing consciousness part. Like this is the mind shift part that is the hardest to undo because it's the most pervasive part of oppression, what you believe about yourself, right? How you move when you believe this about yourself. And how you move when you believe certain things about children, which is why I've walked around saying that our girls are sacred and loved, because I'm very clear that when that which you hold sacred is treated very differently than that which you treat as disposable or that you understand to be disposable. And so it is really about creating conditions that allow for us to do that kind of real healing so that our young people can grow into adults that are, you know, well adjusted. And that's across the racial spectrum, across the economic spectrum, across the type of school that you know young people are attending. If our communities understand that no child is disposable, then we move differently with those children.
SPEAKER_00:That's exactly right. I want to shift to your latest book, Girls Unlimited, which talks a lot about that healing process and valuing of our girls. You state that in this book, I present a framework that educators can use to create a learning environment that facilitates belonging for Black girls and other students. The framework features an intentional emphasis on taking actions that counter school push out through a critical element of childhood development, cultivating the righteous mind. Talk to us about the righteous mind and why it is important as an intervention for black girls.
SPEAKER_01:I dedicated a chapter to the righteous mind in my book, Cultivating Joyful Learning Spaces for Black Girls, Insights into Interrupting School Pushout. And it is in that conversation I have with Dr. Venus Evans Winters that we start talking about the righteous mind and how our schools need to be locations that invite a young person to enter with their whole self, right? Not to sort of parse out who they are, but to enter with every part of them and to be able to engage learning using all these different parts of them. The righteous mind is that mind that understands and experiences a freedom to interrogate, a freedom to explore, and a freedom to learn. And often young people are entering schools across the gender and racial spectrum, feeling like they can't bring themselves completely to the inquiry, like they can't bring themselves totally to school because we tell them not to bring themselves to school, right? We tell them how they what they can wear, what they can't wear, we tell them how to wear their hair, they can't bring themselves to school. And when we already set the parameters around not all of you is welcome here, not all of you can be functional here, then it we start to invite either aspects of harm into the school in rebellion, or we invite in a space where young people check out and don't feel like school is a location for their learning. And so that has been the challenge, I think, for a lot of our learning spaces because we don't spend a lot of time facilitating a righteous mind. We spend a lot of time fostering a mind that can just spit back information. It's about critical thinking versus just rote memorization, right? And so the work in Girls Unlimited is to explore all of these ways that young people, especially girls, are embodying knowledge that is often excluded from our understandings and that then result in analyses that are frankly underdeveloped and andor under-theorized. And so the effort here is to, in the book, get us to think about like how can we facilitate spaces where girls are invited to bring their full selves to school, where they can think about the development of themselves as righteous beings, right? And where they can learn freely. A lot of times people may hear that phrase and think, I want advocacy and fight back and all these, you know, but really what I want is freedom, right? To me, like a righteous mind is a mind that is able to understand and have deep discernment. And the discernment we try to teach out of girls from a very early age by inviting them to not think critically about certain factors or just to accept certain conditions or to be quiet and not question things, don't have a mouth, you know, and questioning certain things. And I think that does them a disservice. What we've got to do is figure out how to hone those questions, how to hone these skill sets, how to move into a place where we're not telling young people to be quiet because we don't think they have something valuable to say, but we're teaching them how to communicate in ways that can facilitate people hearing them and them being a part of our collective learning experience. This starts in the families, right? In the mother of two girls and they're now young women. My mother is old school and there was no talking back. And I remember I was intentional with my daughters to invite them to ask me questions. And my mother just saw that my kids, she said, Your kids talk back to you, right? She was like, I'm not having it. They talk back and I don't know what you're trying to do here. And I was like, I'm trying to raise critical thinkers. I need them to ask me questions. I'm a safe space for them to ask the question, right? So if I make a decision and I'm moving in a way that they don't quite understand, I never said shut up because I said so. I didn't do that. And it meant a lot more labor for me to be able to say, okay, here's how I arrived at this decision. You may not agree with this decision, but guess what? I'm gonna have the final say. But here's how I arrived at this situation. Here's how I arrived at the decision. And we would have the normal authority dynamics with parent and child, but it wasn't until my girls were older and they could articulate certain things and have an analysis and not be fooled by some of the things that they read or some of the things that they see on TV or things that they see in social media that my mother said, okay, now I see what you're doing. Right. And it doesn't mean we all get it right every time, but it means that you have a practice around interrogation and engagement and asking, and you know that your questions are valid because I said your voice was valid, right? From a very early age. You understand your knowing to be an important part of this. You don't feel like, oh, it doesn't matter. I don't matter. You do matter, and you're very clear about how you matter. And that invites you into conversations, it invites you into rooms where you will present yourself as if you matter.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. That's powerful. That questioning and critical thinking is extremely important. And thinking about Alice Walker's four-part definition that includes womanism, and part of that is the talk back, right? And raising womanish girls, that's SAS, and that's the mindset shifting, right? Society would have us to think that that talkback is the angry black woman, right? It's deviance, it's sad. We have to discipline it and punish it. But for our community, that is our power, our magic, right? That is how we assert our humanity and way of knowing. And so we have Abolition Academy with Abolitionist Sanctuary, and I created an abolitionist pedagogy called PACs. And so each course that we design teaches people P for principles, A, analysis, and that's the critical engagement, C connection, that's the community accountability, transformation, which is the real life implication, and sanctuary, right? And so growing up in Harlem, New York, I went to a very radical school. In fact, our founder received the MacArthur Fellowship for innovating education in this way. And we had five habits of mind. We did not have any tests, we did not take home homework. We called our teachers by their first name with small classes, and we had to defend portfolios in order to graduate. Part of those five habits of minds was how do you know what you know? It was this critical thinking. What if something was different, right? And so that critical thinking and questioning is key. And when you think about religion, a lot of our church mothers have taught us not to question, right? Don't question God. But that questioning is indeed revolutionary and radical. I have about three more questions, and we we're at time. So I'm not sure if I'm gonna get to them all before we get to our wrap-it round. And perhaps I can list all three and you tell me which one you want to take. But I wanted to give you just two more questions around your book, Girls Unlimited. You talk about the unique positionality of girls. And so I wanted to know this unique positionality of girls. How does Black girls' revolutionary dreaming and futurity point to the worthiness of Black girls and the investment in them? So that's one question. And then I just the second was if you could tell us three takeaways or just one favorite moment in the book that you would like to share with us and the reason why you think everybody who is listening right now should purchase a copy. And then the third final one was I wanted to know your definition of abolition and why does it matter for the vision for black girls?
SPEAKER_01:So quickly, the abolition to me is an end of systems of oppression. But I want to talk about the manifestations of oppression. I think I'll try to answer the two together by sharing that when I say black girls occupy or girls occupy a unique positionality, what I mean is where they sit in society, holding all of their intersections, they come to this analysis of the world they live in, the worlds they live in, um, through those lenses. And so it's important, I think, for us to honor all these different lenses and to engage with girls in ways that allow for them to grow their belief in and confidence in their ways of knowing from a very, very early age. And so my favorite story from Girls Unlimited, or one of my favorite stories from Girls Unlimited, is in the chapter where I'm talking about knowing. And I talk about how I used to bring my daughters to work with me all the time. And my youngest daughter has always asked a lot of questions, has always been interested in these notions of freedom. I've started reading narratives of enslaved people when she was in the third grade. She was uniquely interested in this question of freedom. And I know it had to do with the fact that I'd taken her to the Jafure in West Africa when she was four years old. And so she had an opportunity to understand the system of enslavement and understanding even our family proximity to people who were incarcerated through a specific lens of oppression. She understood that. And she was really proud of herself for knowing a lot of things and really engaging. But there was one moment where she had an opportunity to engage with a very brilliant legal scholar, Priscilla Ochen. And she, you know, sort of playfully was talking to, she was eight years old and she was playfully talking to Priscilla. And she was like, How old are you? And Priscilla said, How old do you think I am? And she said, I think you're 19. And Priscilla was like, Oh, love you, right? Because she was not 19. And then, and then, and then she said, you know, Mahogany was feeling herself. She was like, Oh, I've read so many books, and you know, she just wanted to be praised for being so smart. And Priscilla said, That's really great, but you need to have a critical analysis, yeah, right. And so at eight years old, Mahogany was invited to have a critical analysis of the books that she's reading, of her experiences. And that was like a shape shifter in her brain, right? Like she just from that moment on was like, huh, I can analyze all these different things. I can understand them differently. I can understand them as an eight-year-old, I can understand them as a girl, I can ask the questions I need to ask. And it was a special invitation, I think, for her and also for her sister to be able to really think about locating themselves in every inquiry. So, you know, I think Girls Unlimited is about inviting all of us into a re-examination of how we understand the power of girls, where we locate power in society, and to structure our engagements with girls with great intentionality to facilitate their well-being. So I always say if you love a girl and you understand that she is valuable and you want to play a role in her well-being, get girls unlimited and do your part.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you heard it here on the Avalition Sanctuary podcast. Get your copy of Girls Unlimited by Dr. Monique Coopsen. Dr. Monique, as we close, we're gonna go into a wraparound of questioning, but I would be remiss if I just don't make this connection. You mentioned the safety you found in libraries.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And my mom, growing up to a poor single black mom, that was our outing on a Friday night, Saturday. She was an avid reader, and I would sit in the bed with her and I would try to read as fast as she was turning the pages. She would read like these thousand-page books in a day. And so we shared that love for reading. And I too found sanctuary. Uh, shout out to librarians. Um, particularly, there was a library on 124th Street and Fifth Avenue across across from Mount Morris Park, right next to a covenant with black nuns. And that was our library. So I just want to say that it resonates with me, the safety you found in the library. So thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And I got to shout out my favorite library in the Western edition next to St. Dominic's Church. Yes. Love the libraries.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So as we conclude our episode, we have a rapid round. So you did not get these words in advance. Just want to acknowledge that for the audience. So as I mentioned, a word or question, you tell us what quickly comes to mind. Just just one sentence or one word response. So the first word is prince.
SPEAKER_01:My love.
SPEAKER_00:Money.
SPEAKER_01:A tool.
SPEAKER_00:Marriage.
SPEAKER_01:Sacred.
SPEAKER_00:Black girls.
SPEAKER_01:Beautiful.
SPEAKER_00:Mother until my joy.
SPEAKER_01:My honor.
SPEAKER_00:Healing. Necessary. The bay. Kendrick or drink. Neither. Eighties hip hop or nineties R and B.
SPEAKER_01:I gotta go with eighties hip hop. Guilty pleasure. I don't know if I have a guilty pleasure. Maybe shoes. Okay. Something you do for fun. Sit quietly and watch silly shows.
SPEAKER_00:Most prized accomplishments.
SPEAKER_01:Being a mother.
SPEAKER_00:Favorite movie?
SPEAKER_01:It's the tie between purple rain and coming to America.
SPEAKER_00:Favorite color.
SPEAKER_01:Emerald Green. Favorite food? My food. So you know. Shout out to Vegans. Favorite place? It used to be Yosemite. I think now it's becoming Turks and Caicos. Nice.
SPEAKER_00:Turn up or Netflix and show.
SPEAKER_01:Probably Netflix. No, because what I did in my 20s, I don't do in my 50s.
SPEAKER_00:I'm trying to get answers. I'm trying to stay inside. Delta Sigma Theta Savority Incorporated.
SPEAKER_01:My cherished sisterhood that taught me the value of how to lead, to lead in a way that honors our deep history and importance of social action.
SPEAKER_00:And finally, abolitionist sanctuary.
SPEAKER_01:A reimagination of how we heal and how we build systems that facilitate well-being.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much, Dr. Kuvesin, for being here. Thank you for joining this conversation on the Abolitionist Sanctuary podcast. Please download and share on all platforms. Again, I am your host, Reverend Dr. Nakia Smith Robert, founder and executive director of Abolitionist Sanctuary. Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and download our social mobile app. Also, enroll in our courses and become certified in abolitionacademy.com. Don't forget to become a member and subscribe to our mailing list at abolitionistsanctuary.org. As we conclude this episode, remember that abolition is not only a practice, but it is a way of life. And for me, abolition is my religion. Let's lead a faith-based abolitionist movement together to repair harms, restore relationships, and rebuild more just and equitable systems. Thank you so much, Dr. Koostan.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. What a joy.
