Coumba Diouf is an author, educator, and community leader who has spent her career transforming lives through the magic of storytelling. She is the founder of AdunaKids, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to cultural exchange, empowerment, and personal development. Launched in 2021 during one of the most isolating periods in recent memory, AdunaKids brings people together across the Bay Area through programs rooted in cultural immersion, creative expression, and community connection. Coumba and her team give children, youth, and people of all ages the tools to become their most authentic selves.
The spark for AdunaKids came from a seemingly fleeting moment. As a longtime educator who has worked with young people across many settings, Coumba often encounters former students. She briefly reconnected with one particular young woman who she had known as a joyful, vibrant young child. When Coumba saw her again as a young adult, something was different. “I looked in her eyes and saw no vision, no sense of what to do next in life,” Coumba recalls. It was a quiet, unspoken moment, but it was enough. Coumba knew she needed to help build something for young people like her former student: a community-rooted solution to help them come into their own. Despite the COVID lockdown, she brought together friends and community leaders that soon became the backbone of the fledgling Aduna Academy. Coumba remembers with a laugh how they barely knew how to log in to Zoom at the beginning, as virtual meetings were just beginning to become a part of our daily lives. From there, AdunaKids has grown to a team of over 50 volunteers, touching hundreds of lives over the last 5 years.
Helping Young People Author Their Own Futures
One of the first projects that sprang from Coumba’s small but mighty team was to encourage high school seniors and mentor them through the daunting journey of applying to college during a global pandemic. The teens Coumba connected with were undeniably bright but struggling to see a path forward. Looking back, we now understand the full magnitude of the difficulties faced by the generation that came of age during the height of social distancing and virtual learning. Their transition into adulthood was marred by missed celebrations for milestones like graduation and a pervasive sense of uncertainty about what came next. For the San Francisco youth Coumba worked with, she used the personal statement required for many college applications as an exercise to help each person take back control of their own story, crystalizing their values, celebrating their achievements, and articulating their dreams for the future.
These stories proved to be catalysts for personal and academic success. Several students went on to graduate from prestigious universities. More importantly, in a full-circle moment that clearly moves Coumba deeply, some have already come back to serve on AdunaKids’ Advisory Board. One student, Xiomara, credits her experience as a member of Aduna’s first cohort as a key to her success. A recent Penn State graduate, Xiomara is on her own path to leadership, using the skills she honed working with Coumba to create policy solutions for our nation’s deepest challenges.
This is how Coumba measures success: not just in milestones reached, but in people who return. In the young people who once needed support and now show up to offer it. It is living proof that when you help someone find their story, they carry it forward.
Story as a Birthright
For Coumba, storytelling is not a strategy. It is a gift passed down across generations. She traces her relationship with storytelling back to her childhood in Senegal, to the moments she spent with her mother in the kitchen, just listening. “My mother would tell stories about her life, and I felt like I had lived them,” Coumba shares. “I knew all the people she described, where she went, what she wore. I didn’t know it would have such a lasting and profound impact.” That intimacy, the ability of a well-told story to collapse time and distance, became the foundation of everything Coumba would later build. It is, she says, the most beautiful gift her mother gave her, and one she is determined to keep giving.
This inheritance has shown up in every chapter of Coumba’s professional life. As an ESL teacher and educator, she wove storytelling into her classroom, giving students the tools to find and share their own voices. As a nonprofit founder, she has channeled it into workshops and programs that help young people articulate who they are and what they value. At AdunaKids, storytelling is both the medium and the message: A way of honoring where participants come from while helping them imagine where they might go.
For women who want to create change, Coumba’s advice is clear and unhesitating: Believe It. “You have to believe in what it is you want to do and keep going,” she says. She cautions aspiring leaders to expect challenges. In her own experience, building a nonprofit from scratch was not a straightforward path, but she is confident that each of us has a unique story, purpose, and spark within us that we must share. “If there’s something that’s been in you for so long,” she says, “you’d be robbing us of the opportunity to see it if you don’t pursue your vision.”
Above all, Coumba invites us all to find our most grounded and authentic self, and keep telling our story.