ABOUT VALERIE

Valerie Eguavoen is a creative, social justice advocate, and movement lawyer and strategist. She is the founder of YOU BELONG NOW and the Associate Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. 

In 2015, Valerie launched ON A CURVE, formerly “Fashion On A Curve,” as a plus-size blog with the goal of showcasing her unique sense of style and inspiring other plus size women to dress boldly and express their individuality through fashion. Today, the platform is a space for expressing and inspiring creativity and a vehicle for change in society.

A first-generation Nigerian American, Eguavoen’s activism has been cultivated over the last decade and a half as a student of social justice movements and through community advocacy. 

Valerie previosuly served as the Director of External Affairs for Repairers of the Breach, a non-partisan organization that seeks to build a moral agenda and movement rooted in the moral values of justice, fairness, and the common good. In her role, she provided strategic guidance for the organization’s development and programmatic activities.

She is also the former Legal Coordinator for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, where she developed and managed a nationwide legal support program and database of volunteer lawyers and legal workers to support direct action in over 26 states. Prior to that, she served as the Pauli Murray Law and Development Fellow at Forward Justice, where she supported the appellate litigation team in NAACP v. McCrory, the landmark voting rights case that challenged and struck down North Carolina’s 2013 “monster” voter suppression bill. She was also a member of the 2016 North Carolina election protection team, advocating against voter roll purges and election worker intimidation in rural North Carolina.  

Eguavoen’s activism expands to the creative industry. Her work in this area focuses on public education and developing strategic initiatives to end institutional racism and economic exploitation in the creative sector, specifically the fashion industry. She is the founder of YOU BELONG NOW, a movement of creatives committed to social change. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Essence, and Forbes. 

She earned a J.D. from Howard University School of Law, where she served on the Civil Rights Clinic, and a bachelor’s degree in Political Philosophy and Black Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.