BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM

Brittany Packnett Cunningham is an American activist, educator, writer, and leader in the social justice movement. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Baptist minister father and a social worker mother, she grew up attending rallies and serving her community alongside her parents — an upbringing that laid the foundation for a lifetime of advocacy. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in secondary education from American University in Washington, D.C.

While in D.C., she began her teaching career with Teach For America, a nonprofit organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach for at least two years in low-income communities. After several years in the classroom, she returned to St. Louis to serve as executive director of the organization's local chapter. That same year, Darren Wilson, a white police officer, fatally shot Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man living in Ferguson, Missouri. Not long after the shooting, she learned that Michael had been connected to the Teach For America community, making the tragedy deeply personal.

Brittany became a prominent figure in the movement for police accountability and racial justice during the unrest that followed. She used Twitter and other social media platforms to counter what she perceived as biased media coverage of the protests, and The Washington Post described her as heavily involved in organizing on the ground. She continued to use her voice to advance conversations surrounding education, voting rights, and equal pay, making her a significant figure on Black Twitter.

In 2015, she co-founded Campaign Zero, a policy platform designed to end police violence in the United States. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon also appointed her to the Ferguson Commission, established to help the state respond to the unrest, and President Obama appointed her to the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, contributing to policy recommendations for improving police-community relations.

Woven through all of it is a question Brittany has carried since childhood — rooted in a book that sat on the coffee table in her childhood home. I Dream a World, a celebrated collection of portraits of Black women by photographer Brian Lanker, featured Septima Clark on its cover: a pioneering civil rights educator, with pride and wisdom radiating from her face. That image planted a seed. Brittany would go on to model her own career as an activist and educator on Clark's legacy, drawn to the quiet authority and unshakeable confidence she saw in that portrait.

That encounter with confidence — what it looks like, who is permitted to have it, and how it can be cultivated — became one of the defining threads of Brittany's life and work. She believes we profoundly underestimate it: confidence is the necessary spark before everything that follows, the difference between being inspired and actually getting started, between trying and doing until it's done. It is what keeps us going when we fail, and what pulls us out from under the weight of all the can'ts, won'ts, and impossibles. Without it, we get stuck — and when we get stuck, we can't even begin. She also offers this as a useful check: if you don't have enough confidence, it may mean you need to readjust your goal. If you have too much, it may mean you are not rooted in something real.

This conviction was forged, in part, in her classroom. All of her students were Black and brown, growing up in low-income circumstances — some immigrants, some disabled, all of them among the very last people that society traditionally invites to be confident. Her classroom, she believed, needed to be a place where her students could build what she calls the muscle of confidence — learning to face each day with the certainty they would need to redesign the world in the image of their own dreams. As she put it: what are academic skills without the confidence to use them to go out and change the world?

Two students in particular shaped her thinking. Jamal was brilliant but unfocused, unable to stay still for more than a few minutes — the kind of student who could perplex brand-new teachers unsure how to support him. Brittany took a direct approach: she negotiated with Jamal. If he could give her focused work, he could do it from anywhere in the room — from the carpet, from behind her desk, even from inside his locker, which turned out to be his favorite spot. His least favorite subject was writing, and he never wanted to read his work aloud in class — until the day she hosted a mock 2008 presidential election and everything changed.

Regina was also brilliant, and inevitably finished her work early, at which point she would start distracting other students — walking around, talking, passing notes, the kind of behavior teachers dread and kids love. Despite Brittany's high ideals for her classroom, she too often defaulted to choosing compliance over confidence. Regina became a test of her own values. One day, Brittany snapped and chose control. Her response did not communicate to Regina that her behavior was a distraction — it communicated to Regina that she herself was a distraction. Brittany watched the light go out in her eyes. She has literally prayed, in the years since, that she did not do irreparable harm — because as a woman who was once a girl just like Regina, she knew she could have begun the process of extinguishing her confidence forever.

Not everyone lacks confidence equally. Society makes it easier for some people to develop it, rewarding confidence in certain people while punishing it in others — all because they fit a preferred archetype of leadership. For some of us, Brittany says, confidence is a revolutionary choice. And it would be our greatest shame to see our best ideas go unrealized and our brightest dreams go unreached simply because we lacked the engine to pursue them. That is not a risk she is willing to take.

So how do we build it? Brittany says it takes at least three things:

Permission, which births confidence. Community, which nurtures it. And Curiosity, which affirms it.

In education, there is a saying: You can't be what you can't see. Brittany's parents understood this intuitively. Growing up, her family did everything together, including the seemingly mundane — like buying the family car. Her parents staged the same quiet performance at the dealership: her father would sit while her mother shopped. When her mother found a car she liked, they would meet with the dealer, and inevitably the dealer would turn his body and attention toward her father, assuming he controlled the purse and therefore the negotiation. Her father would always respond the same way — slowly and silently gesture toward her mother, then fold his hands back in his lap. Brittany isn't sure whether it was the sheer shock of negotiating finances with a Black woman in the 1980s, but she watched her mother work those car dealers over until they practically gave the car away. She never cracked a smile. She was always willing to walk away.

Her mother wasn't just getting a good deal on a minivan — she was giving Brittany permission to defy expectations and show up confidently in her own power, no matter who doubted her.

Community is where confidence finds a safe place to be tried. On a trip to Kenya to learn about women's empowerment, Brittany met a group of young women called Team Lioness — among the first all-female community ranger groups in Kenya. These eight young women, still in their teenage years, were making history. Brittany asked Purity, the most talkative of the group, whether she ever gets scared. "Of course I do," she said, "but I call on my sisters. They remind me that we will be better than these men and that we will not fail." Her confidence to chase down lions and catch poachers did not come from athleticism alone — it was held up by sisterhood. She was saying: if I am ever in doubt, I need you to be there to restore my hope and rebuild my certainty.

Curiosity, Brittany learned, can save a fragile confidence. Early in her career, she led a large-scale event that did not go as planned — it was, by her own admission, terrible. When she debriefed with her manager, instead of reviewing every mistake, her manager opened with a simple question: What was your intention? She knew Brittany was already beating herself up, and rather than damage her already fragile confidence, that question invited her to learn from her own experience. Curiosity puts people in charge of their own learning. That exchange allowed Brittany to approach her next project with an expectation of success.

Permission, community, curiosity — these are the things we need to cultivate the confidence required to solve our greatest challenges and build the world we deserve.

Brittany's TED Talk, The Revolution of Confidence, has been translated into 22 languages and viewed nearly 8 million times worldwide, making it one of the top ten TED Talks of 2019. She hosts and executive produces the critically acclaimed podcast UNDISTRACTED, now in its third season on the Meteor Network, and in 2020 founded Love & Power Works, a social impact agency where she leads grassroots strategy, advises global political and cultural leaders, and consults with organizations committed to lasting social change. She serves as Vice President of Social Impact at BET and as an NBC News and MSNBC Political Analyst, and was a Resident, Residential, and Director's Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, where her study group on intersectional activism proved so popular she was invited back for two additional semesters.

President Barack Obama has cited her as a leader whose voice "is going to be making a difference for years to come." She has been recognized on TIME Magazine's list of 12 New Faces of Black Leadership and Fortune's World's Greatest Leaders list — honors that reflect not just a career, but a calling.

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