Fern Gillespie
When the Bridge Street Development Corporation (BSDC) Board of Directors recently appointed Rev. Valerie Cousin as its interim chair, she had already served 27 years as a key member of the BSDC board. Over the decades, she had been an active BSDC board member operating as chair of fundraising, board secretary and other duties.

Bridge Street Development Corporation is an instrumental part of her life. Her husband Rev. David Byron Cousin, Sr., is pastor of Bridge Street AME Church, the church which founded BSDC in 1995. She is the executive pastor of the church. Rev. Cousin balances the trio of roles as the church’s first lady, executive pastor and interim board chair with the skill set of an executive administrator, which was her career as a college official for over 20 years.

“At Bridge Street Development Corporation, our motto is Building on Community Strength. The entire board of directors helps support the work and vision of our CEO. Whether it’s community engagement, supporting our small businesses, assisting churches and faith-based institutions that own buildings to rehab them to get the equity and increase the quality of life of folks living in them,” Rev. Cousin told Our Time Press.

“Whether it’s constructing multi-use buildings or rehabbing existing buildings in the community that provide affordable housing. We support community engagement with programs, not only in our senior buildings, but in the Open Streets program with commerce, public spaces, and community performances.”

Gregory Anderson, President & CEO, Bridge Street Development Corporation, and Rev. Cousin have collaborated on social impact community programs for years.
“Rev. Valerie Cousin has been a trusted advisor and steady leader throughout my tenure as President & CEO,” Anderson told Our Time Press.

“As board secretary and a long-standing member of our Executive Committee and other key committees, she has consistently provided thoughtful guidance, deep institutional knowledge, and a deep commitment to our mission. I am confident she will continue to serve the organization well as Interim Board Chair. I look forward to continuing our work of Building on Community Strength with Rev. Cousin in her new role.”

Previously Edward Odom, Jr. was the longtime board chair of Bridge Street Development Corporation. “She is a very dedicated, hard-working, committed individual to her community, her church and her family,” Odom told Our Time Press. “I want to acknowledge Edward Odom, Jr., for his strong leadership, professionalism, and steady hand as Board Chair during several important periods of growth and transition for the organization.,” said Anderson. “We are pleased that he will continue to serve as a member of the Board.” Rev. Cousin agreed. “Edward Odom has had an instrumental impact on BSDC. I am looking forward to his involvement as a board member.”

Before being called to the ministry in 2004, Rev. Cousin aspired to be a president of a community college. Her career in higher education spanned positions as manager of student loan, and financial aid’s accounting office at Fairleigh Dickinson University; assistant dean for business and finance at a Westchester community college and director of business affairs at Purchase College.

She holds a Bachelors degree in accounting from Alabama State University, Master of Public Administration from Seton Hall University, and a Master of Divinity in Preaching and Worship from Columbia University/Union Theological Seminary. In addition, she holds a Certificate in Fundraising and Development from Marymount College.

“While I was studying education at Columbia University, one day I was sitting in my car and I felt a level of unrest in my spirit. Columbia Union theological seminary was across the street. The spirit started talking at me, saying to go over there and audit a class,“ she recalled. “I said, I’m not interested in preaching.

My husband is a pastor. We don’t need two pastors in the house.”
Since the 1980s, she has been a pastor’s wife. Her husband, Rev. David Byron Cousin, Sr., and her were college sweethearts who had married in 1981. Together, with their two sons, the couple moved to his pastoral appointments in New Jersey’s Salem, East Orange and Princeton.

She got involved in local community nonprofits and gained leadership roles on the Princeton YMCA board and at Rheedlen Center for Children and Families board (now Harlem Children’s Zone) when he was appointed to Harlem. In 1997, the family became a part of Brooklyn’s Bridge Street AME Church.

Switching from education to theology at Columbia University was a pivotal move for Rev. Cousin. “After auditing the theology class at Columbia, I accepted the call to the ministry,” she said. “Being a college president was a passion of mine. It was a desire, but I don’t think it was ever a calling. When you have the most urgent call of your life, that’s the one that you should be doing. I left my job and went into the seminary full time.”

Bridge Street AME welcomed her as a minister. “My husband sked me what title I was interested in functioning under,” she said. “Based on my skill set on working in higher education administration, dealing with policies and procedures, I told him after research that I wanted to be executive minister. The executive arm of your leadership.”

As executive minister, she transferred her higher education administration skills to the church management. Rev. Cousin created AME procedure manuals for baptisms, funerals, class leaders and stewardesses. Soon, she was giving workshops at churches, even the historic first AME church founded in Philadelphia in 1794.

“You name it, I was the manual queen,” she said. “Manuals help you keep order. I believe that everyone needs to know what everybody is supposed to do. This way, there’s no room for error. The Methodist Church is a church of order. We have our Methodist order of worship. You can go to any AME church and the order of worship will be similar.”

She was born in Chicago in a family of six siblings. Her parents worked at Chicago’s ComEd. In 1969, at age nine, her father moved the family to his widowed mother’s rural farm in Alabama. It was, at first, a culture shock for a city kid. “My grandmother still had an outhouse. She had a woodburning stove where she did all her cooking. Somebody had to cut that wood up in the fall to make sure that she had enough wood to go through the winter,” she remembered.

“My father would help his mother with any maintenance and upkeep on the farm.” Living in Alabama was life-changing for her. She attended Alabama State University, met her husband and pledged AKA, where she is still an active soror.

“I’m working with the Missionary Society at Bridge Street doing community outreach. I’m working with the youth, the Women’s Ministry and the Christian Education Department. All of those components have community service work that they do. I’m out there with them,” she said. “We all have gifts, graces, intellect and human capital that we can bring to the table to make our world, our community, our church what we know that it can become.”