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Dunia Dialogues

@duniadialogues

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A cultural storytelling platform exploring identity, migration, memory & belonging.
Created by Teresa Temu @terezush
Columbus, OH

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My heart is still full from August 16th!

The very first Dunia Dialogues: Mamas Who Move the World was nothing short of magical. 🌍💛 Together, we filled ABA Art Gallery with stories of motherhood, identity, and leadership — and the energy in that room reminded me why I started this journey.

To every guest, every mama, every supporter who showed up and poured love into this evening: thank you. You helped me bring a vision to life.

This is just the beginning. I can’t wait to gather again soon for the next Dunia Dialogues — because our stories deserve the spotlight, and our voices move the world.

🎥 Relive the magic with me in this recap video, and if you missed it — don’t worry, more is on the way.

Want to join the movement?
Comment “Mamas Who Move the World” below 👇🏾 and I’ll DM you the link to my interest form so you can be first to know about upcoming events & topics.

#DuniaDialogues #MamasWhoMoveTheWorld #ColumbusCulture #MotherhoodIdentityLeadership taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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a year ago

Dunia Dialogues is one year old. 🌍

This August marks one year since I hosted the first Dunia Dialogues gathering in Columbus—a conversation about motherhood, identity and career.

What began as one gathering has grown into a curated cultural storytelling series rooted in conversation, lived experience and collective meaning-making.

At the heart of Dunia Dialogues is a belief that lived experience is cultural knowledge.

I create spaces where people can bring what they know—not only what they have studied, but what they have lived, inherited, remembered, lost and carried.

I curate conversations around identity, migration, motherhood, memory, culture, belonging and power, bringing people together whose experiences can illuminate these questions from different perspectives.
And then I listen.

Our most recent gathering explored community-led solutions to Black maternal and infant mortality. Beneath that conversation was another question:
What knowledge about birth, motherhood and care have African and diasporic women carried—and what have we lost through centuries of forced assimilation and cultural disruption?

We gathered to surface birthing practices, traditions and forms of care that have been forgotten, interrupted or pushed aside, and to ask what becomes possible when communities look to their own histories and knowledge systems.
This is collective storytelling as a cultural practice.

A woman’s story can be a window into history.
A mother’s experience can reveal a pattern.
A conversation can reconnect knowledge across generations and geography.

Dunia Dialogues centers Black mothers and women of the African diaspora, creating spaces where our experiences can meet across borders, generations and migration.
Dunia means world in Swahili.

If you are a Black woman, a mother, a daughter of the diaspora, or someone who believes our communities have knowledge worth listening to—come with us.
Follow @duniadialogues. 🌍

Founded and developed by Teresa Temu @terezush
#DuniaDialogues #CollectiveStorytelling #AfricanDiaspora #BlackMotherhood #ColumbusOhio taken in Zora's House by @duniadialogues

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What does belonging look like when you inherit it from the women who came before you?

This time, we asked Black women and mothers about belonging:

Where did you first feel it?

What was handed down to you?

What did your mothers and grandmothers teach you about being a woman, a mother, and a member of a community?

And perhaps most importantly:

What has to survive for the next generation?

The knowledge circles were held by women who carry deep knowledge of their own.

Thank you to our facilitators:

Dr. Tina D. Pierce, @worthfoundation
Rashaan Cargile-Gregory, MSW, LSW
Faisa Ali @nuumacare @peapod.social
Kristin Mallory @columbuschamber
Monique Whipple, doula @thebirthplug
Georgina Stephenson

And then something happened that stopped me for a moment.

Several mamas came with their grown daughters.

That is exactly the kind of intergenerational exchange I hope Dunia can make possible.

Because belonging isn’t only something we feel.

It can be something we learn, practice, remember, transmit—and remake.

That is the work I’m increasingly interested in through Dunia Dialogues:

What happens when we create space for women to examine not only what they have inherited, but what they want to carry forward?

The best day of my September. 🤎

#SheCarriedItHere #DuniaDialogues #BlackMotherhood #CulturalMemory taken in Zora's House by @duniadialogues

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22 days ago

This Thursday, Dunia Dialogues enters a new room.

I’ll be presenting the Ohio Senate Black Maternal Health Caucus to share about the work and evolving model behind Dunia Dialogues—and to talk about what happens when community knowledge enters conversations about Black maternal health.

Dunia began with a simple conviction:
Mothers’ lived experience is knowledge.
Through She Carried It Here, I’ve been bringing Black mothers and Black diaspora women into structured dialogue across culture, migration, and generations—and bringing doulas, social workers, health workers, and other practitioners into conversation with them.
Because different forms of expertise don’t have to compete.

They can inform one another.

And this is the direction I’m building toward:
Convene → Identify → Translate → Partner → Return
We don’t extract stories and disappear.

We convene.
We identify.
We translate.
We partner.
We return.

I’m grateful to the Ohio Black Maternal Health Caucus for making space for this conversation.
Follow @DuniaDialogues as we take community knowledge from the circle into the rooms where health, civic, and policy decisions are being shaped.
💜 taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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25 days ago

Some people leave an impression on you before you even know that you’ll work together.

I met Rashaan Cargile-Gregory @cgrashaan earlier this year at the Wright’s Way Foundation Maternal Mental Health Summit. One thing that stood out to me was how easily she connected with people. She has a very warm, energetic way of being in a room, but also the kind of presence that makes people feel comfortable opening up.

I had already been hosting Dunia gatherings for more than a year, but when I decided to introduce knowledge circles as a new format, Rashaan was the first person I called.

I offered her the role of facilitating one of the circles, and I’m so glad she said yes.

Rashaan facilitated Circle #4 — Acacia, and she brought so much care, energy, and confidence to the room.

She came early. She called me beforehand to make sure she had everything she needed. She asked thoughtful questions. And when it was time to facilitate, she held her circle with so much care and confidence.

You could feel that she knew how to be with people.

And that mattered to me because Dunia Dialogues is ultimately about people. About the stories we carry, the identities we negotiate, the things we inherit, and the things we are still trying to understand about ourselves.

The women who helped me bring that gathering to life gave their time freely. Rashaan was one of them, and I’m genuinely grateful that she was part of that beginning.

Rashaan is a licensed social worker (MSW, LSW) with years of experience working with women and families across Ohio, including in maternal mental health. She brings culturally responsive care, community experience, humor, and a very human approach to her work.

And since I know many of you are looking for thoughtful people to connect with in Columbus, I wanted to make sure you know her, too. 🤎

Thank you, Rashaan, for being part of the first knowledge circles.

I’m very happy to have you in this story.

#DuniaDialogues #LSWColumbus #knowledgecircles @terezush #DuniaCommunity taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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We ask the wrong question about immigrant culture. We ask, “How do we preserve it?”
But culture changes when people move. This one’s about child language brokering — a 9-year-old translating a lease for her mother, holding authority her parents never had at that age.
A tradition being invented right now, at kitchen tables across Columbus. 🎥
#DuniaDialogues | #AfricanImmigrantHeritageMonth | #AsSeenInColumbus | #ColumbusOhio | #DiasporaVoices taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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What if some of the knowledge we need to improve Black maternal health is already sitting inside our communities?

That’s the question behind She Carried It Here — a Dunia Dialogues gathering bringing Black mothers together across culture, migration, and generations, and into conversation with doulas, social workers, and health practitioners. 🎥

#DuniaDialogues | #SheCarriedItHere | #BlackMaternalHealth | #AsSeenInColumbus | #ColumbusOhio taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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African Immigrant Heritage Month isn’t only for African immigrants to observe.

In a pluralistic society, we understand it through each other — through the histories of the people around us.

This one’s about why that matters, and what happens when different diasporic histories sit at the same table. 🎥

#DuniaDialogues | #AfricanImmigrantHeritageMonth | #AsSeenInColumbus | #ColumbusOhio | #PluralisticSociety by @duniadialogues

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Jollof. Music. Weddings. That’s the Africa most Americans notice.

The deeper culture is the one that shows up when no one’s watching — how we feel time, what belonging means, who shows up when you’re sick.

As an Africanist, that’s the knowledge I’m interested in documenting. 🎥

#DuniaDialogues | #AfricanImmigrantHeritageMonth | #AsSeenInColumbus | #ColumbusOhio | #Africanist taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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I loved seeing African immigrant communities celebrated at Gracie Mansion this week. It also made me ask a very Columbus-specific question: Where is Columbus in this conversation?

We have African festivals, Africa Day, African-led civic organizations, entrepreneurs, professionals, families and communities shaping this city.

So what comes next?

How do we move from visibility to authorship?

That’s the question I’m exploring through this series—and through my work with Dunia Dialogues.

Mayor Mamdani @nycmayor, I’m watching what you’re building in New York. I’m curious what this conversation could look like in Columbus.

#DuniaDialogues | #AfricanImmigrantHeritageMonth | #AsSeenInColumbus | #ColumbusOhio | #AfricanImmigrants taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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What happens when women from different countries sit down and discover how much they already share?

Dr. Lizzie Brontë, PhD, reflects on her Jacaranda Circle — from food and wellness to the enduring wisdom of it takes a village.

A beautiful reminder that our cultural knowledge travels with us. 🌍

Thank you, @iamdrbronte

#DuniaDialogues #mamaswhomovetheworld taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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Why I created Dunia Dialogues. 🌍

I’ve spent years studying language, culture, migration and the ways people make meaning across different worlds.

But some of the most important knowledge I’ve encountered didn’t come from books.

It came from people talking to one another.
From mothers sharing stories.

From women remembering what their grandmothers taught them.

From conversations where someone suddenly says, “Wait. We did that too.”

That recognition is part of what inspired Dunia Dialogues.
I wanted to create spaces where our experiences could become a source of collective knowledge.

So I developed a methodology around a few simple practices:

We gather.
We begin with a question that matters to the community.
We listen.
We make room for lived experience, memory, cultural knowledge and perspectives that are often overlooked.

We connect.

We place different experiences in conversation with one another—across generations, cultures, geographies and the African diaspora.

We surface.

We look for the histories, patterns, practices and possibilities emerging from those stories.

And then we ask:
What can we learn from what the community already knows?

This is why Dunia Dialogues is not simply a series of events.

It is a practice of collective storytelling and cultural inquiry.

The conversation itself becomes a way of learning.
A gathering becomes a way of reconnecting knowledge.
And a personal story can become part of a much larger cultural narrative.

This is especially important to me when we talk about Black motherhood, migration and the African diaspora, where so much knowledge has traveled with people—sometimes surviving in fragments, sometimes disappearing, sometimes waiting to be remembered.
Dunia Dialogues creates space to remember, question, connect and imagine together.

And I’m still learning from every conversation.
That is part of the methodology, too.

🌍 Follow @duniadialogues and join the conversation.
Founded and developed by Teresa Temu @terezush

#DuniaDialogues #CollectiveStorytelling #AfricanDiaspora #CulturalKnowledge ColumbusOhio taken in Columbus, Ohio by @duniadialogues

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