Brittany Plange

Brittany Plange was a part of the Moore High School Speech and Debate Team for 3 years. There she competed in Original Oratory, Domestic Extemp, Poetry, Lincoln-Douglas Debate, and Public Forum Debate. She placed in the State Tournament of Oklahoma in Original Oratory her junior year and attended NSDA Nationals her Junior and Senior year. After high school Brittany went on to attend The University of Oklahoma for college. There she walked onto the OU Policy Debate and achieved numerous awards. Her freshmen year she and her partner, Natasha Sebunya, won the Cross-Examination Debate Association National Championship in the Novice/Junior Varsity division. They went onto win the 4th annual Mukai College Classic at Weber State in 2016, where Brittany also received 1st speaker, making them the first black team and black women team to win a national tournament in OU’s team history. Since then, she was a Semifinalist of the first half of the UC Berkeley tournament and Double Octo-finalist of the second half of the UC Berkeley tournament. Brittany went on to graduate with her B.A. in Women & Gender Studies, as well as African & African American Studies from the University of Oklahoma.

The experiences Brittany had from her time in debate led her to seek a career in legal defense non-profit organizations. In her various roles she has been able to contextualize the theories she discussed, debated, and championed while in school and apply them to her work. She began her career at Still She Rises (SSR) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There her role as an advocate was to help clients navigate the criminal legal system and/or the child welfare system in tandem with their attorneys. She is currently working at the National Homelessness Law Center and will be attending the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis to get her MSW.