The announcement arrived as a three-slide Instagram carousel, set to an instrumental of Megan Thee Stallion’s “BOA.” Two college women are now holding microgrants from the rapper’s Pete & Thomas Foundation and the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium, and the money comes with an assignment: use it to stage civic engagement events on their own campuses.
The recipients are Allanah Tate, a senior political science major at Florida A&M University, and Alexandria Criner, a sophomore at the University of Georgia studying political science and religion. Both serve as ambassadors for Black Girls Govern, the young nonprofit that exists to build a pipeline of Black girl civic leaders, and both arrived at the role the same way, as winners of the #BlackGirlJoyChallenge, the Consortium’s signature microgrant program.
A Small Grant With a Long Reach
The 2026 cycle of the challenge awarded $550 apiece to 100 girls and femme-identifying youth, ages 13 to 24, across 13 Southern states, funds meant for projects the recipients design themselves. The Pete & Thomas Foundation, which Megan Thee Stallion founded in 2022 and named for her late parents, Holly Thomas and Joseph Pete Jr., has partnered on the challenge since 2022, directing money toward education, housing, and health and wellness in underserved communities. The Consortium counts 1,000 challenge awards to date.
Small checks can compound. At 12, Mila Henry took a challenge grant and used it to start MH Boxes, a nonprofit that sends mental health care packages to Black girls. In July 2025, the Pete & Thomas Foundation honored Henry, then 13, at its inaugural gala in New York, on the same program as Consortium founder LaTosha Brown. The distance between a $550 award and a gala stage turned out to be about three years.
The Pipeline Is the Point
Black Girls Govern is barely older than its ambassadors’ college careers. Harlie Williams, a Harvard sophomore studying government and a first-generation college student, founded the organization in June 2025 after hearing the same note in conversation after conversation: Black women carry American democracy, and almost nobody is building the bench behind them. Its ambassador program runs nine months, with monthly leadership workshops, mentorship, semester funding for campus events, and two advocacy capstone projects. Tate at FAMU and Criner at Georgia are what that structure looks like in practice, students with titles, budgets, and rooms to fill.
Behind them stands the Consortium’s longer project. Brown established it in 2017 with Felecia Lucky of the Black Belt Community Foundation, Alice Jenkins of the Fund for Southern Communities, and Margo Miller of the Appalachian Community Fund, after data showed Black women and girls receiving less than 1 percent of the $4.8 billion in philanthropic investment flowing into the South. The Consortium has since awarded $11.4 million to more than 250 Black women-led organizations across its 13 states, using participatory grantmaking that puts community members on the panels deciding where money goes. Brown’s formulation of the work is blunt: “If you change the life of a Black girl, you change the world.”
The microgrants to Tate and Criner sit at the narrow end of that funnel, celebrity philanthropy converted into campus infrastructure: a reserved room, a printed flyer, a first meeting. Five hundred fifty dollars will never trend on its own. What it buys, in the hands of two young women who already know exactly which rooms on their campuses sit empty, just might.
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