Building a Life of Service and Purpose: Felicia Appenteng ’07

Looking back, Felicia Appenteng ’07 sees a recurring theme throughout her personal narrative, whether she was a prospective college student or an executive with a career spanning the Atlantic. “I have never really gone through a chapter in my adult life without people from the Wesleyan community helping me to shape it in really fundamental ways,” she says.  

Before matriculating, Appenteng encountered the University through her father, Kofi Appenteng ’81. “I probably had a lot of love for Wesleyan that I experienced through osmosis,” she says with a chuckle. When she looked at the institution on her own, however, she saw a place that would enable her to create a life centered on service to others, and whose academic approach aligned with her habits of thinking across disciplines. “I got to Wesleyan, found the College of Letters, and saw that there was a structure that would allow me to do that with rigor and discipline. That creative, imaginative, expansive framework to look at complex issues was the greatest gift I could have received.” 

A detour to Madrid—first a semester studying abroad, then a job that enabled her to stay the summer—turned into a career springboard. Upon graduating from Wesleyan, Appenteng returned to Madrid to work with Instituto de Empresa (IE) University and created IE’s first Africa Center, an entity dedicated to promoting African business, leadership, and innovation. From there, her work with the International Center for Research on Women helped transform the organization’s offices in Asia and Africa into independent, sustainable Gender Centers of Excellence. “Basically every job I’ve had has been one that I’ve created,” she says.  

Now focused on identifying, analyzing, and galvanizing the leading entrepreneurs of the African Diaspora, today Appenteng is program architect at the Africa America Institute. She designs and implements a range of programming across the 72-year-old educational organization’s focus areas: liberatory education, economic sovereignty, global healing and repair, and building community. The work mixes creativity, openness, and practicality—fertile terrain for someone with a COL education, she says. 

And it’s worthwhile to make sure future generations can access those same ways of thinking and of being, Appenteng says. “Figuring out how to build a life of purpose, intention, and service to other people—in a world that is enormously complicated—requires constant conversation, co-creation, and community. And when I find people who share my Wesleyan values, it can make all those things infinitely easier.”