Brigette Rouson
Principal, Rouson Associates
Washington, DC
(202) 460-2025
rousonassociates@gmail.com

Brigette Rouson brings more than twenty years of experience as a consultant, public policy attorney, grant maker, board member, and scholar-activist. Her leadership signature is advancing social transformation through attention to cultural identity. She is the principal of Rouson Associates, a social enterprise dedicated to achieving a just society through capacity building to nonprofits and philanthropy.

Formerly, Rouson was a senior consultant with Mosaica: The Center for Nonprofit Development and Pluralism. She also served as program director for the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, the premier national association of capacity builders devoted to improving nonprofits’ management and governance capacity.

Rouson directed the three-year startup of the alliance’s Cultural Competency Initiative, building the knowledge, will and skill of nonprofit capacity builders to address cultural dynamics in their work. As a board member of the Nonprofit Sector Workforce Coalition, she promotes recruitment and retention of nonprofit sector workers and leadership under age forty. In the alliance, she is a member of affinity groups focused on people of color (which she co-founded with Monika Moss), board governance, executive transitions, and faith-based capacity builders.

In her consulting capacity, Rouson provides expert guidance to numerous funder initiatives, community-based organizations, and national groups. For the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, she serves as a donor-organizer to the African American Women’s Giving Circle and a grant reviewer for its capacity-building fund. Previously, she led grantmaking for girls and young women at Ms. Foundation for Women, including a $4 million collaborative. A graduate of Howard University and Georgetown Law Center, she completed coursework toward a Ph.D. in communications and culture at the University of Pennsylvania. She is proud to be among alumni of Shannon Leadership Institute, as well as Stone Circles and Vallecitos retreats for activists. She has published work on African American women in traditional African spiritual practice, news coverage of interethnic conflict, and low-power TV as a community medium. The mother of a jazz percussionist and spouse of a librarian and music educator, she resides in Washington, D.C. and is a member of the DC Bar.