Rochelle Levy
Founder & Chief Architect
Rochelle Levy is a Harlem-born culture strategist, community builder, and creative whose entire life has been an exercise in showing up fully and making sure the people around her feel safe enough to do the same. She is a co-founder of Black Girl Assembly and she did not arrive at this work by accident. She arrived through years of building, losing, loving, and refusing to let either the losses or the systems write the ending.
Rochelle is the oldest of five and if you know anything about being the firstborn in a family with three sisters and two brothers, you already understand something essential about her. She has always been the one holding the vision, keeping the thread, and making sure everyone has what they need to keep going. That did not stay at home. It became her life's work.
She is the Founder and CEO of Alchemy for Change, a culture strategy firm rooted in the belief that real organizational change requires honesty, cultural intelligence, and genuine care for people. That work has taken her into boardrooms, community spaces, and everywhere in between. But what has always mattered most to Rochelle is not the institution she is working with. It is the people inside it, particularly Black women, who are so often brilliant and unsupported in the same breath.
Black Girl Assembly exists because Rochelle knows firsthand what it means to need a space that holds you without conditions. She knows what it means to be the strong one, the oldest one, the one who keeps it together while quietly carrying more than anyone sees. She knows what it means to do the work of building community while also navigating grief, growth, and the everyday weight of being a Black woman in spaces that were not designed with you in mind. BGA is her answer to all of that. Not a program. Not a platform. A home.
Much of what drives Rochelle is deeply personal. She carries the legacy of her daughter Riley in everything she builds. Riley's life and her loss are not separate from the work. They are woven into it. The urgency Rochelle brings to sisterhood, to healing, to creating spaces where Black women are truly seen — that comes from somewhere real and sacred. Riley lives in the mission. She lives in every woman who walks into a space Rochelle has built and leaves more whole than when she arrived. Black Girl Assembly is part of that legacy and Rochelle tends to it accordingly.
Outside of her work she is a chronic traveler always ready for the next destination, a hiker who lets nature restore what the world depletes, and a devoted dog mom to Rocket, her aussiedoodle who has entirely too much personality for one dog. She is an anime lover, a theater kid who never fully left the stage, and a perfume enthusiast who is intentional about everything including the impression she leaves long after she has walked out of a room. Family is her foundation and her people keep her anchored in what actually matters.
At Black Girl Assembly, Rochelle brings her whole self: the strategist, the oldest sister, the creative, the grieving mother who turned love into legacy, and the community builder who has always believed that the most powerful thing you can offer a Black woman is a space where she does not have to earn her belonging.
She helped build the Assembly because Black girls — in every form, at every age, at every stage — deserve a place to come home to.
Riley would be proud. We certainly are.