Every community has individuals who are talented, credentialed, and still invisible, disconnected from the rooms where opportunity actually gets decided. WeNetworkNow exists to close that gap. Its story starts not with a business plan, but with a question.
In 2007 Mamady Konneh left Guinea Conakry for the United States, carrying the same quiet assumption every immigrant carries: that hard work would be enough. It wasn’t the coursework that exposed the gap, it was the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). When Mamady asked his parents about the FAFSA process, they had no idea what it was. There was no one in his immediate circle who did.
That single moment became the seed of WeNetworkNow. Mamady started asking around, and the answer he kept finding wasn’t a lack of talent or ambition within the African diaspora, it was a lack of connective tissue. Professionals, students, and families were solving the same problems in isolation, with no safe space where they can shared their challenges. Seeking advice from his own community, he saw the deeper pattern: greater collaboration among the different groups within the African diaspora wasn’t happening, and nothing existed to make it happen.
Mamady, who would go on to build a career in cybersecurity, deciding who gets access to what systems, and why, turned that same principle toward people instead of infrastructure. He was determined to harness the collective knowledge of a vibrant community to support the youth and students of African descent as they navigated the complex pathway to personal and professional success in the United States. Before launching WeNetworkNow, he spent months running community surveys and interviews, making sure WeNetworkNow would be built around what the community actually needed, not what seemed obvious from the outside.
WeNetworkNow officially launched in January 2020. The inaugural event drew dozens of African professionals, representing every region of the continent, proof, from day one, that the appetite for this kind of collaboration was real and continental in scope.
Since then, WeNetworkNow has grown into a hub of networking events, workshops, and mentorship programs reaching thousands of professionals across the United States and Africa. Its identity centers on uplifting the experiences and cultures of African immigrants, but its doors are open wider than that: refugees, immigrants, and anyone looking to find a community and better understand the path to professional success. Three pillars hold that mission up:
- Community. At its core, WeNetworkNow is a hub where members of the African diaspora learn from one another and support each other’s success, a standing table where knowledge that once lived in scattered pockets of the community is finally shared in one place.
- Collaboration. WeNetworkNow gives its members access to a wide array of talented professionals across backgrounds and industries, and builds intersectional partnerships that shift the predominant narrative around immigrant and refugee professional achievement on local and national platforms. That collaborative instinct extends beyond the community itself: WeNetworkNow has partnered with the State of Minnesota, Okta, the Minneapolis Foundation, Lifeworks, the Cyber Security Summit, and the City of Lakes Rotary, among others, to carry its mission into rooms the organization couldn’t reach alone.
- Celebration. WeNetworkNow makes space to celebrate the different cultures within the African diaspora, and one another, a reminder that this work is not just about closing gaps, but about honoring what members already bring with them.
Partnerships with well-known organizations across the United States helped WeNetworkNow land a feature on CBS. That same collaborative and community-driven spirit carried the mission across the Atlantic. In 2025, WeNetworkNow teamed up with AfricaHackon to bring cybersecurity training to young people in Kenya, proof that the knowledge Mamady set out to share was never meant to flow in just one direction.
It’s a full-circle story: communities sharing knowledge and supporting each other across continents. Mamady didn’t just solve the problem for himself. He built a whole support system, so no one else would have to figure it out alone.
