African Women Build: Celebrating 5 Years of Building

In the last 5 years of documenting and branding the stories of African women, WCA has experienced our joys, triumphs, challenges and lessons learnt when it comes to building. So when I reflected on how to actually celebrate 5 years of building WCA no other term was well fitting than #Africanwomenbuild. The concept being that building is a process, but the idea is you have to start from somewhere. This year's theme for WCA to mark our 5th anniversary focuses on our story and what has the term building meant for us as a media brand over the last 5 years. To think that a dream that I started with and a conversation that I had with my friend Ashleigh Washington on the platform of 147th and St Nicholas Avenue started from a blog and is  now a media brand  is truly a dream come true. I wouldn't say I knew exactly where I wanted WCA to go when I started, I just knew that I had gotten tired of always talking about the amazing women brands I had been meeting and wanted a space to curate, share and brand their stories. And since 2012 I am proud to say we have kept that promise. So now what's next? We officially begin our year with the African women Build series. The series will capture stories of African women who have been building for the last 5 years. 

We define building when it comes to business, career, family relationships etc. So we took the first step with our original Bosschiques we launched with in 2012 and hosted a photo shoot with Tamara Flemming an amazing photographer  and a series of video shoots to document their lives in the last 5 years and to understand what building has meant for them. To me there was no other way to begin our 5 year celebration without celebrating them. They believed in my vision from day 1 and are truly a sisterhood I cherish.

I  encourage you to stay tuned to whats in store for this year because we are taking some directional shifts that we think would be exciting for the professional, business owners, non profit owners, individual brands owned by African women in the diaspora and on the continent. We will continue to maintain our promise of curating and sharing your stories and putting the interests of African women at the center of our work. We look forward to an amazing 2017 with you all. 

Photo Credit Tamara Flemming Relavant Images