Voqal knows that taking risks with innovative, progressive ideas is necessary to advance social change. The Voqal Fellowship is an investment in people as individuals and budding entrepreneurs. It is a talent accelerator aimed at giving those often overlooked by traditional funders a chance to enact their visions at center stage. This month we take a look at one of these individuals from the 2021 Voqal Fellowship cohort, Trinice McNally.
McNally’s project, Disrupting the Criminalization and Myths of Black Migrants, serves to educate, mobilize, and agitate people around the criminalization of Black migrants and the impact of anti-Blackness resulting from colonization.
McNally (she/her) is a nationally recognized transformative leader, scholar, organizer, and creative committed to the liberation of oppressed people. She is most passionate about developing strategies and best practices for higher education institutions to foster welcoming and inclusive environments for their historically marginalized populations through programmatic, advocacy, and political education efforts. In addition, she enjoys providing political education and strategy support for Washington D.C. and Maryland college students, faculty, and staff committed to abolition, immigrant rights, and community accountability. She is a Black Queer Feminist who spends her time politicizing her students and community.
She is also a budding creative who understands cultural work as a necessary intervention to dismantle racial injustice, disrupt the status quo, combat global anti-Blackness, and imperialism through fashion, arts, and archiving.
McNally hails from London, England – with her lineage traced to St. Mary’s, Jamaica, by way of Miami, Florida. She is a member of the Black Youth Project 100, National Women’s Studies Association, UndocuBlack Network, Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. She currently serves as the founding director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Multicultural Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs.
You can learn more about the Voqal Fellowship and this year’s cohort on our fellowships page.