African Women Connect: How I started and grew a networking group of African immigrant women for friendship, business, and community.

African Women Connect (AWC) was created for African immigrant women to come together, get to know each other, build valuable relationships, share experiences and resources, and find solutions to issues affecting them and their community. This book is about the founder’s experiences starting and growing AWC, a social and professional networking group, over a period of six years. This was accomplished through events involving over four hundred attendees from twenty different African countries and the United States. Through experimentation and observation and implementing a set of guiding principles, the founder, Ms. Apaloo, was able to generate interests and build on what was most common. She relied on social norms in African immigrant communities in the United States in general and Minnesota in particular. Her story includes successes, missteps, and discoveries along the way.