Summary
Organization name
The Black Girl Advocate, LLC
other names
Ladies First
2024
Tax id (EIN)
99-0725880
Category
Education
Organization Size
Small Organization
Address
1312 17TH ST 2339DENVER, CO 80202
Denver, CO, US
Vision
Black Girl Excel Academically
Population
The Black Girl Advocate serves Black Girls in Colorado!
Programs
Black Girls in the Arts
Black Girls in the Arts serves Black girls with arts interest or talent across visual arts, music, theater, dance, creative writing, and design. The program connects participants to working Black women artists, develops creative skill through structured instruction, and provides performance and exhibition pathways that move girls from private practice to public presentation.
I Got Next: Girls in Sports
I Got Next is Ladies First's sports sub-program, serving Black girls across basketball, volleyball, track and field, soccer, gymnastics, and other Colorado high school sports. The program connects girls to Black women coaches, training facilities, athletic exposure opportunities, and the college sport pathway.
Black Girl Hair Project
Black Girl Hair Project serves Black girls K-12 (extending Ladies First's age band downward for this specific work) through hair literacy, body autonomy education, and access to professional salon care. The program teaches girls about their own hair, their own scalp, and their own bodies, in language that is medical, cultural, and personal at once.
Senior Suite
Senior Suite serves Black girls in their twelfth grade year, navigating the most logistically and emotionally complex year of their K-12 lives. The sub-program provides senior year coaching, transition support, college and post-secondary planning, and ritual recognition of the completion itself.
College Tours
College Tours is Ladies First's college exposure sub-program, taking Black girls onto college campuses across the country with intention, curation, and follow-through. The program operates on two tracks:
- HBCU Tour, BGA's flagship college tour, designed to be the most historically rich Historically Black College and University tour in the country, exposing Black girls to the schools that have produced generations of Black leadership
- Black Girl Ivy League Tour, BGA's planned expansion (year three of the five-year plan), targeted to become the nation's largest Black girl Ivy League tour
Black Women in Education (BWIE)
Black Women in Education (BWIE) is one of two top-level programs at The Black Girl Advocate. Where Ladies First centers Black girls grades 6 through 12, BWIE centers the Black women who teach them, lead them, counsel them, coach them, and carry them. BWIE is a year-round professional, wellness, and recognition program for Black women educators across Colorado, built on the premise that the women shaping the next generation of Black girls cannot pour from an empty cup, and have been asked to do exactly that for too long.
BGA's Education-Based Values:
- Excellence — Striving for academic and personal achievement despite systemic barriers.
- Leadership — Stepping into power and guiding peers and communities.
- Resilience — Sustaining strength through challenges while honoring self-care.
- Rest — We believe in an intentional and easeful act of restoring our minds, bodies, and spirits to our own essence and asé that allows for connection to our whole selves.
- Curiosity — Valuing learning, questioning, and exploration of the world.
Giving Activity
Mission
Empowering Brilliant girls through academics, athletics and the arts.
Background Statement
BGA was established to fill a specific gap in Colorado: the absence of girl-specific programming designed for Black girls on an inheritance frame, one that starts from what a girl already carries rather than what a system says she lacks.
Since 2021, BGA has grown from a single in-school space into a statewide organization serving 300 Black girls cumulatively, 200 in 2025 alone, across every income level, school type, and zip code in Colorado, from the first-generation college applicant navigating FAFSA to the only Black girl in her AP class. Scholars move through a four-stage developmental journey, Seed, Shape, Sharpen, and Soar, with programming that meets each girl at her stage.
BGA's model is the only Black girl developmental framework in the United States integrating three components into a single, replicable structure with documented outcomes:
Womanist Pedagogy: Programming centers Black girls' brilliance as the starting point, not the destination, with curriculum drawn from the Black women's intellectual canon, including Walker, Hurston, Lorde, Butler, and hooks, as primary text.
Multi-Generational Sisterhood: Every scholar is connected to Black women alumnae, professionals, and elders who model the futures she is being prepared to inherit.
Economic Patronage Stewardship: Programming routes scholar and program spending through Black-owned businesses, teaching economic stewardship as a practiced discipline.
The results are documented. 100% of BGA scholars graduate high school, against a national rate of roughly 89% for Black girls. 96% enroll in college, against a national rate near 40% for Black women. Scholars have secured $1.9 million in scholarships, scholar self-efficacy has increased 107%, and 90% of scholars stay with BGA across multiple programs. Anchored in a five-volume published research library, BGA builds the infrastructure Black girls in Colorado were never handed, and the outcomes show what happens when someone does.
Media gallery
Organization Data
DENVER, CO 80202