Courtney Robinson, Ph.D.
An outspoken advocate and change-maker who experienced parental incarceration during childhood, Courtney Robinson is the founder of the Excellence & Advancement. As an adult she spent 10 years researching the impact of schooling, race and incarceration. Her research led her to engage in the movement to break the school-to-prison pipeline in Texas.
Originally from Dallas, Courtney attended Howard University in Washington D.C. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, Courtney worked at a community college in California. There, she encountered young men restarting their lives after prison and worked to help them achieve their goals. She returned to Texas after five years to become executive director of a non-profit serving high school students. She established a relationship with a judge in Midland, Texas and worked to create a first-time offender program in Midland County. After ten years of working with children in the criminal justice system, Ms. Robinson decided she needed more education to better serve the juvenile justice system.
Courtney entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. In 2008, she became a volunteer for the Texas Youth Commission, helping the agency recover from devastating abuse allegations and implement reforms. In 2014, she founded the Excellence & Advancement Foundation to address the school-to-prison pipeline in Austin, Texas. Her work is inspired both by her family history and the inspiration she has drawn from the resilience of the young people she’s encountered working to reconstruct their lives after confinement.