Today we’d like to introduce you to Delanyo Mensah.
Hi Delanyo, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I learned to read when I was three, sounding out road signs from my car seat on the way to hospital appointments. A lot of waiting rooms and long car rides with my parents reading to me the whole time. I grew up in Athens, Ohio as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. At school I was a nameless Black face in a sea of white ones. At home I was Delanyo the scholar, Delanyo the future doctor, Delanyo the pinnacle of the perfect African child. I also grew in a community of international graduate students and professors, where I had friends decades older than me and was talking about the world at an age when most kids my age were arguing about One Direction. Somewhere inside all of that I was also queer, without the word. I think I learned very early to notice the rules of a room because I was always moving between worlds and never entirely inside any one of them.
Went to Vanderbilt. Social justice and advocacy after that, now leading racial justice and civic engagement at YWCA. Outside of that, a lot of things that used to feel separate and increasingly don’t: writing, art, facilitation, curation, community building. Looking back, the through line is less that I chose one path and more that I kept following what I was already paying attention to: belonging, identity, power, what people hide, what helps them become more fully themselves. I’ve been asking the same questions my whole life. I just keep finding new rooms to ask them in.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not. Of course there’s a lot of external stuff but the most interesting part has been internal. I spent years performing a version of myself that was easier for other people to hold. Picked the respectable thing. Made myself legible to institutions, parents, and LinkedIn. I’d build something, watch it work, and then immediately wonder if I was allowed to have done that.
I’m still catching myself doing it honestly, but getting better at not negotiating against myself before anyone else gets the chance.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I make rooms where people can finally say the thing they’ve been holding. Sometimes that’s public programming professionally. Other times I build the room myself through experiences like C*NTINUUM, which brought 150-plus people together around Black queer joy, creativity, and community care. And sometimes the room is a page. I write personal essays about becoming and the negotiations we make with ourselves to avoid the life we actually want.
That repetition across all those forms is what led me to develop the Changemaker Framework: Remembering, Naming, Seeing, Strategy, Integration. A map I made after watching transformation happen enough times that I started to see the pattern underneath it.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I look at the world through windows and mirrors. Always have. I’m genuinely curious about the human experience, how people love, how they lie to themselves, what makes them feel like they belong. One of the most important relationships in my life is with Suzanne, a retired ESL teacher who is fifty years older than me. She treated me like a person whose thoughts were worth taking seriously when I was six or seven years old. A little Black girl and an older white woman actually seeing each other, finding the similarities, opening portals into worlds neither of us could have accessed alone. That relationship is a microcosm of my whole life philosophy.
That curiosity is what allows me to expand people. I name things they’ve been feeling without language for. I connect them to each other and to the parts of themselves they forgot were there. I find the thread between seemingly unrelated worlds and pull it until something new becomes visible. Most of what I’ve built started with a question and a willingness to move before I had proof it would work. So maybe the quality that has mattered most is curiosity with enough audacity to follow it.
Pricing:
- Changemaker Reset $44
Contact Info:
- Website: https://delanyothechangemaker.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delanyothechangemaker/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delanyo-mensah-293084200/
