More than a summer: How the Lighthouse is building a generation of Black women who know how to lead, research and rest
The Lighthouse continues to ask what becomes possible when Black girls and young women are given the space and time to study, understand and decide
Cohorts of young women descend on Jackson, interrogate it
This summer, a small cohort of young Black women arrived in Jackson, Mississippi. They hailed from different schools, disciplines and parts of the country to spend four days together as fellows in The Lighthouse | Black Girl Projects’ Black Girl Research Institute, or BGRI. They came to meet one another, to learn more about the organization and to begin laying the groundwork for a year of research. However, for Dr. Charity Clay, vice president of learning and impact at The Lighthouse, one of the most important parts of those four days happened when the fellows moved beyond simply observing Jackson and began learning how to interrogate it.
Why does development stop here? Why might the name of a street change after a particular intersection? Why are resources concentrated in one neighborhood and conspicuously absent from another?
“The way cities operate is intentionally designed,” Clay says, explaining the lesson was not simply about Jackson, but about teaching emerging researchers to notice the political, economic and historical decisions embedded in the places they inhabit. She wanted the fellows to return to their own communities asking similar questions about why one neighborhood has no grocery store, why schools and resources are clustered in certain areas, who participated in creating those conditions and, perhaps most importantly, who benefits from them.
Black Girl Summer still summered, just a little differently
This was Black Girl Summer in 2026. Historically, Black Girl Summer has operated as a point of convergence within The Lighthouse ecosystem, bringing young women from multiple programs together and incorporating experiences such as the Cultural Learning Tour, where participants travel across the south, learning how stories of resistance explore the places and stories "that illuminate how Black girls and women have shaped — and continue to shape — the fight for liberation.'. Instead of a large, multi-state tour, BGRI held its own four-day gathering in Jackson, while participants in the Reese Brooks Gilbert Collegiate Leadership Initiative, or RBG, another of The Lighthouse’s signature programs, moved into a new iteration of its work. Taken together, those changes make this year less a story about one summer itinerary and more a story about an evolving ecosystem trying to create different pathways for Black girls and young women to understand history, develop leadership, conduct research and find community without insisting that all of those things happen in exactly the same way.
Joe Worthy, chief impact officer at The Lighthouse, remembers what that philosophy looked like during a Cultural Learning Tour in a previous year, when participants stopped for lunch in New Orleans after a long, hot day. The logistics of moving everyone around had been difficult, but then a song came over the restaurant speakers and, almost spontaneously, the young women began singing. “They all just started singing,” Worthy remembers. “They were just free.” It is a deceptively ordinary memory, but Worthy returns to it because, for him, the Cultural Learning Tour is never simply an educational excursion through sites of Black history across the South. The tour connects histories of enslavement, resistance, organizing and civil rights with the young women encountering those places in the present, creating what he describes as a kind of rite of passage.
“Right now they can be loud, they can be free, they can sing,” he says. “They can do what girls do, you know, what young women do.” The larger intention, Worthy explains, was for participants to understand “it’s not just them or their projects or their résumé,” but they are entering a much longer lineage of Black women who have struggled, organized, imagined and built before them.
RBG: the leadership program that doesn’t “teach” leadership
That question of lineage also sits near the center of RBG, a two-year leadership-development program for collegiate Black women whose name comes from three characters in “A Different World”: Kimberly Reese, Freddie Brooks and Whitley Gilbert. Dr. LaShay Harvey, who facilitates the program, uses those women as archetypes through which participants can examine different expressions of Black women’s leadership. Freddie offers a more radical orientation, Kimberly demonstrates an ability to navigate institutions and communicate across structures of power, while Whitley, whose background includes Black wealth and social status, offers a way of thinking about influence and what Harvey calls “soft power.” The point is not for participants to decide which fictional woman they want to become, but to recognize that leadership already exists in different configurations within themselves.
“You’re not a leader by accident,” Harvey tells them. “There are actually skill sets that you possess.”
Harvey entered RBG during a period of transition.. “We feel like we need a redo,” Harvey says participants told leadership. Instead of treating that notion as something to hide, Harvey incorporated the process of course correction into what she wanted participants to learn about leadership itself: Black-led organizations can encounter problems, people can disappoint one another, plans can fail to materialize in the way they were imagined, but leadership also requires knowing how to acknowledge a rupture and figure out what comes after it.
From there, participants explored Black feminist thought, community development, team building and the practical question of how their individual strengths might contribute to collective work, but Harvey also introduced a question often missing from conversations about Black women’s leadership: How are you going to remain well while doing all of this?
“You have to always consider yourself as an instrument. And not just a leader.”
Some of the young women, Harvey says, had already internalized the expectation that Black women simply keep going, carrying responsibilities and communities even when they are exhausted, and while they may have learned how organizations function or how power operates, they had not necessarily been asked, “But how will I be well in this work?” Harvey began bringing rest, delegation and burnout into conversations about impact because she does not believe leadership can be sustainable if the person doing the leading is treated as inexhaustible. She compares a leader to an instrument:
“You clean instruments, you polish instruments, you don’t leave instruments in the sun,” she says. “You have to always consider yourself as an instrument. And not just a leader.”
For 21-year-old Kennesaw State University senior Tolina Yussuf, who studies interactive design and information systems, RBG became a place to practice some of those lessons. A first-generation college student from Atlanta, Yussuf entered the program during her sophomore year looking for mentorship and community after spending considerable time in academic spaces where she felt isolated. “I knew that community meant all the difference in whether someone like me would be successful or not,” she says.
Over time, she became more comfortable advocating for herself, something she acknowledged has not always come naturally. “I had a tendency to not really ask for help out of fear of being ridiculed and just my needs not being met,” Yussuf says, whereas at The Lighthouse, speaking her mind and offering feedback were encouraged. RBG also gave her a sustained academic encounter with Black feminist thought, expanding beyond feminist frameworks she had previously encountered in school and creating space for engagement with Black women thinkers and writers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison.
Yussuf is also clear about where the experience could have been stronger; yet one of the clearest examples of what she says she gained from RBG happened when something outside the program went wrong. Two weeks before she was scheduled to begin a UX/UI internship, organizational changes eliminated the opportunity, leaving her suddenly without the professional experience she had planned for. Instead of quietly absorbing the disappointment, she told Harvey what had happened and asked for help.
Harvey passed the message along, and The Lighthouse eventually created an internship for Yussuf conducting a website audit, where she worked with a UX professional and gained practical experience related to her degree. The
significance is almost mundane in its straightforwardness: Yussuf says the program taught her to advocate for herself, and when she needed something, she practiced doing exactly that.
Black Girl Research Institute studies artificial intelligence and its impact on Black girls
While RBG asks young women to think about how they lead, BGRI asks them to think about how they know. Worthy traces the institute’s roots to the COVID-19 pandemic, when traditional gatherings were disrupted while research about the pandemic was proliferating, prompting The Lighthouse to ask what was happening specifically to Black girls and women in the Southeast. A research-focused Black Girl Summer grew from that moment and eventually developed into Black Girl Research Institute, which Clay is now redesigning as a yearlong program teaching fellows how social science research and data can inform advocacy and community work. The Jackson gathering established the foundation, allowing participants to stay together, eat together and build relationships outside formal sessions before spending the coming months seeing one another largely through screens.
“You have a network,” Clay says, and that network has been intentionally built across disciplines, universities, ages and educational experiences so that a STEM student might be learning alongside someone in the humanities, or a student considering graduate school might be exchanging ideas with someone navigating a completely different path.
This year’s BGRI research theme is artificial intelligence and its impact on Black girls, women and communities, and after leaving Jackson the fellows continued their work through a six-week study of Safiya Umoja Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression,” which examines the ways search technologies can reproduce racism and sexism. Madison Foster, a 20-year-old junior honors biology student at North Carolina A&T State University who hopes to attend dental school, discovered BGRI through an email from her university and initially saw research experience as something that could strengthen her future applications. Then she saw the program’s name. “Oh, Black girls,” Foster remembers thinking. “This is something that I could really be interested in.”
Foster already had experience with scientific research through biology, but BGRI introduced her to social science and a different way of constructing a research question. Her developing project examines artificial intelligence, healthcare and Black communities, including whose experiences are represented in the information used to build emerging technologies and which communities might be overlooked as those technologies become more deeply integrated into medicine. Before the fellowship, Foster jokes, she was a “ChatGPT warrior” who treated the technology like a new Google.
She still uses AI tools but now approaches them with questions she wasn’t necessarily asking before. “The Lighthouse has taught me to look beyond the surface of an issue and understand how history, community and access to resources can all influence what we see happening in the world today,” Foster says, adding she’s has learned to ask “who is being affected by certain decisions and whose experiences may not always be considered.”
The fellows have since moved into scholarly articles, data sources and literature reviews as they begin developing individual research projects that are expected to culminate in policy briefs, academic-facing work or community-focused white papers. Clay, however, is careful not to declare the cohort transformed before the research has even been completed. When asked whether she had already witnessed measurable growth during the summer gathering, she declined to manufacture an inspirational answer, explaining that as a researcher and evaluator she is still establishing a baseline, learning who the fellows are and what they already know so their growth could eventually be measured against something real.
Black Girl Summer, in that sense, was not the culmination of the experience but rather it was the beginning.
For Foster, some of what has mattered most so far has been considerably less formal than a literature review. During meetings, fellows are asked a recurring question: “What’s going on in your Black girl world?” Foster says she has never experienced a support system where people so consistently check in on what is happening in her life, specifically as a Black woman. And the fellowship has also given her friendships she might otherwise never have formed, including with another student who was already attending her own university. “I know that I’m not in this alone,” Foster says. “I have my peers to lean on.”
That sense of not having to do any of this alone may be the thread that connects programs that otherwise have different purposes and, this year, did not even share the same summer experience. Worthy remembered young women singing in a New Orleans restaurant during a previous tour and sees freedom worth noticing; Harvey watched young leaders admit they were exhausted and began asking whether leadership could exist without consuming them; Yussuf learned to ask for help and found herself in a moment when she had to practice it; Foster arrived looking for research experience and found herself asking larger questions about technology, medicine, evidence and whose lives get represented in data.
Black Girl Summer may have looked a little different in 2026, but through research, Black feminist thought, leadership development and community, The Lighthouse | Black Girl Projects continues to ask what becomes possible when Black girls and young women are given the space to study the world, understand themselves and decide what they want to change.
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