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Teresa Temu | Dunia Dialogues

@terezush

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Africanist • Cultural Strategist • Facilitator
I decode culture, migration & belonging.
Founder @duniadialogues
Facilitation • Speaking • Consulting↓

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If you’ve been wondering who I am and what I’m doing in Columbus, here’s the short version.

I’m Teresa Temu. I’m an Africanist, educator, cultural strategist and facilitator.

I study culture, migration, language and belonging—and I build spaces where people can actually have conversations across those differences.

In Columbus, that has meant working across community organizations, education, civic spaces and cultural institutions.

I’ve convened immigrant communities.

I’ve taught languages.

I’ve built cultural programs.

I’ve facilitated conversations.

I’ve worked with institutions trying to understand the communities they serve.

And through Dunia Dialogues, I’m building something of my own: a platform for cultural storytelling, community knowledge and civic conversation.

Columbus is my laboratory.

I’m interested in what this city can teach us about migration, belonging, language, identity and the future of American communities.

That’s the work I’m here to do.

#DuniaConsulting | #DuniaDialogues | #ColumbusOH taken in Columbus, Ohio by @terezush

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2 years 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 @terezush

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25 days ago

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 @terezush

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21 days ago

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 @terezush

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a month ago

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 @terezush

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a month ago

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 @terezush

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a month ago

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 @terezush

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a month ago

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 @terezush

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a month ago

I didn’t realize how much this moment would stay with me.

Standing in that room, surrounded by women from more than 20 diaspora communities, I kept thinking about a question that had been following me for a long time:

What knowledge are immigrant communities already carrying?

We spend a lot of time asking immigrant communities what they need from institutions.

I wanted to ask something different.

What did they arrive with?

On June 20, I brought that question into Zora’s House for @duniadialogues She Carried It Here: Motherhood, Memory & What We Carry, a Dunia Dialogues gathering exploring cultural knowledge, motherhood, migration, and what gets passed from one generation to the next.

43 Black women. More than 20 diaspora communities. Five knowledge circles. One room.

I didn’t want to simply collect people’s stories. I wanted to create a process through which the women themselves could generate knowledge together.

We listened. We documented. We began building an oral archive.

Then the work raised another question for me:

Who gets to decide what an archive says?

Writing something down isn’t the end of the process. The people whose knowledge created the record should have a say in how that record is shaped.

So on September 26, we return to the conversation. The women who gathered in June will come back to continue what we started.

The room will stay intentionally small. Some conversations get less powerful when we make them bigger than they need to be.

This is the work I want to keep building through Dunia Dialogues: spaces where communities generate knowledge, shape how it’s carried forward, and bring it into institutional rooms with their authority intact.

She Carried It Here returns September 26 in Columbus.

If you’ve been following this work, this is the next chapter. More details soon.

What is one piece of knowledge from your own family or culture that you think deserves to be archived, not just remembered?

#SheCarriedItHere #DuniaDialogues #CulturalStrategy #ColumbusOhio #BlackMaternalHealth taken in Zora's House by @terezush

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2 months ago

Before Ingrid, I was an employee. Good at my job, connected in this city, but building someone else’s vision.

When she arrived, something shifted. I started Dunia during her naps. Laptop open, one ear always listening for her.

I built this alongside a full-time job. Still do.

Two years in, Dunia Consulting works with organizations on workforce retention for multilingual frontline teams. The people doing the hardest work leave when the culture was built for someone else.

That’s the problem I walk into.

Dunia Dialogues — the civic community I’ve built here in Columbus — is where I’ve watched what happens when people actually feel seen and heard across difference. That’s the laboratory for the consulting work.

I’m honored to be named one of ASPIRE’s Women Who Dare 2026, presented by the Franklin County Board of Commissioners and powered by The Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity. This recognition sees the whole picture — the consulting, the community, the conviction that both belong together.

To Ana Assis @anassis23 and the @aspirebookofbusiness team: thank you for building something that takes women’s professional work seriously.

To my fellow honorees: see you September 2nd.

#AspireBIG26 | #DuniaConsulting | #DuniaDialogues | #PowerAndPossibilities | #IBetOnMe taken in Columbus, Ohio by @terezush

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2 months ago

I’ve been sitting with this trend for a while because I wanted to do it right.

These aren’t just things I find chic. They’re the truest things about my life right now — mothering across continents, building community in a city that didn’t know my name six years ago, saying ALICE out loud when most people in my position stay quiet about it.

I’m a civic storyteller, a wife, a mom who had her daughter at 35 and hasn’t slowed down since. I run Dunia Dialogues from my living room and my laptop and sometimes my couch with dogs. I advocate for working families because I am one.

This is what my year has looked like. All of it.

#DuniaDialogues | #DuniaConsulting | #KindaChic | #ALICEFamily | #ImmigrantMotherhood taken in Columbus, Ohio by @terezush

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2 months ago

I never thought I’d say this, but Russia prepared us for the work we’re doing in America.

My husband is now doing research at Ohio State that could ultimately help American patients, including work related to cardiovascular health in newborns.

And I came here with an education, years of cross-cultural experience, a love of languages, and a way of seeing the world that I now pour into my work with American teenagers, my consulting practice, and Dunia Dialogues.

Russia gave us opportunities to study, travel, encounter people very different from us, and understand that identity is never as simple as a passport.

It even taught me something about being a Black woman: that who you are can be understood very differently depending on where you are standing.

I have a complicated relationship with America. I criticize her often. 😂 But I also love the people I’ve met here, the young people I’ve had the privilege to work with, and the communities I’ve become part of.

We didn’t arrive empty-handed. We arrived carrying things.

And yes, these days the American Dream feels surprisingly concrete:

I find myself thinking more and more about what it would mean to hold an American passport.

Because citizenship matters. But I’ve been contributing to this country, building relationships here, and helping shape my community long before I can call myself American on paper.

That’s part of why being at the YWCA @ywcacbus with the League of Women Voters @lwvmetrocolumbus to talk about voting rights for New Americans felt so personal.

What does it mean to belong to a country that hasn’t yet fully claimed you?

#ImmigrationAndBelonging
#NewAmericans
#CivicEngagement
#CulturalIdentity
#ColumbusOhio taken in YWCA Columbus by @terezush

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2 months ago