The core values Diana learned from her Ghanain community are integrity, education, and family. She learned early on that intersectionality in her identity was a major influence on the opportunities and barriers presented to her. The women around her were asked if they wanted to be nurses, not doctors. She has often been asked at an event she was attending if she was part of the cleaning staff, just because she is a black woman. As she began to intern at major financial companies, she saw the men around her getting opportunities that she was not organically offered. Her non-profit was born from her own experiences and the experiences of the women in her community. She saw the need as she studied the black woman experience in college, and her education fueled her to explain that her experience was different, and it wasn’t just her. It was a macro issue among black women. Focusing on black women is strategic because it gets to the root of the issues around discrimination. 

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“The way my identity shows up brings a very specific set of issues, problems, good things, and if we don’t specifically build for that and to that, we will lose black women.”

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At 20 years old, Diana went to Ghana for the first time and saw the reality of what her native homeland was like for women. She had a profound experience that hit her with a calling bigger than herself. She knew it was time for her to dedicate her efforts to lifting her fellow black women into opportunities that the world was not giving them. As she puts it, she knows she was built for this. Giving black women the opportunity to work in the STEM fields and letting them see what that could do for their life, not just their career, is Diana’s passion around this non-profit.

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“Purpose and time collided in one moment for me.”

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As Diana started to work with her team to build out an effective model for achieving their  mission, they took note of a few gaps in the current education platforms. Although digital learning platforms have become mainstream today, they leave students with certificates of completion and little else to help them make their next professional move. They decided to infuse their programs with theoretical knowledge through articles and workshops and then follow it with required hands on projects that require their students to collaborate and use AI to actually create useable skills. By adding community into their platform, they offer their students the opportunity to grow social capital and professional networks unlike anything black women across the world have been given before.

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“When word of mouth led us to 4,000 women in 16 countries, that was it [we knew we hit product market fit.]”

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Scaling from a couple hundred accelerator students to thousands around the world is what motivated Diana and her team to evolve their nonprofit into a tech company. Their alumni built the Black SiS online platform themselves and nothing else like it exists. They now track engagement on their platform, GPA, autonomy as a student progresses through the curriculum, and socio-economic status. Their goal to reach the most marginalized black women is one of the motivators to measure how much their programs help lift students economically. Black SiS works with HBCUs, tech companies, and local programs that are also trying to help marginalized black women. They are more interested in partnerships than solo work because they know the reach of their work can go so much further when their students have good access to the internet in their homes and the privilege of tech in their lives. This means that their future focus is making their platform mobile-centric so that they can support even more women and hit their goal of reaching 1 million women by 2026.

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“I really pray for everyone in our organization. I trust and believe for the best of them. I really want this to be an organization that creates a community of Black women that the world has never seen.”

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