Rebel Marie

Rebel Marie has been a school counselor since 2012 and received a master's certificate in Agency Mental Health in 2018. Rebel started her career by working with students part-time after graduate school. In 2014, she became a full-time school counselor for a K-12 school in South Dakota where she worked on keeping kids in the classroom despite language or health barriers.  Rebel started her second master’s degree in 2016 after she witnessed a school counselor bully a trans person. She worked in the counseling outreach center on MSUM while studying to become a licensed Mental Health Counselor. College students of every background enjoyed counseling with Rebel, and she was soon getting requests from community members who were not connected to the college.  Rebel has been running a support group for transgender people since August 2016; for that work she was a YWCA 2018 Woman of the Year nominee and was the Grand Marshal of the Fargo-Moorhead Pride Parade in 2017.

Throughout her career, Rebel has done a lot of work for LGBT+ youth and the LGBT+ community in Fargo, including organizing two women’s marches in North Dakota; planning a conference in Fargo for The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; working to build trust between LGBT+ communities and Fargo-Moorhead community liaisons; working with the North Dakota Human Rights Campaign; and planning interfaith events in the Fargo-Moorhead area.  Rebel also did housing discrimination research with the Fair Housing Association in 2018,  which received national attention. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her wife Kasey and their two young children.