The MEND Journey
About MEND
Our name is a promise, and every letter carries part of it.
Our Mission
Who we are
MEND exists to transform our community by empowering women who have been marginalized and oppressed by societal stigma, by denied education, by rights and roles withheld. We believe the answer begins with mentorship: relationships in which each woman is empowered to identify her strengths, discover her potential, and distribute her gifts to the very communities that have hindered her.
Founded 2026
MEND was founded by Mariama Suma-Keita, a nurse of three decades who turned her own mending into a mission for other women.
Non-profit organization
We are powered by donations, volunteers, and women who give back what they were given.
Flagship The MEND Experience
Our signature gathering, where every woman's journey of mentorship, healing, and discovery begins.
Our Work
How we work
Our mission reaches wherever women need it. We stand with disabled women. We stand with women who need housing as they recover from substance abuse. We stand with women seeking job placement and coaching. And through adult education, we help women in rural and urban areas cultivate growth through farming arts, carving, weaving, preserving trees, and building sustainable ecosystems, so that the communities women return to are stronger for their return.
Where we stand
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Standing with disabled women, whose strength our communities too often overlook
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Housing support for women recovering from substance abuse
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Job placement and coaching that turns skills into livelihoods
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Adult education in farming arts, weaving, carving, and sustainable ecosystems
What MEND means
Our name is a promise, and every letter carries part of it.
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Mentorship
Guidance, wisdom, and connection.
Every woman who walks with MEND is met by someone further along the road and, in time, becomes that person for someone else. Mentorship is how strength is passed from hand to hand.
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Empowerment
Strength, confidence, and voice.
Empowerment is not something given to a woman; it is something uncovered in her. Our work is to help her find what was there all along, and to make sure the world hears it.
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Nurture
Self-care, healing, and support.
Before a woman can pour into her community, she must be allowed to heal. Nurture is the quiet, patient work of restoration, the mending from which everything else follows.
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Discovery & Distribution
Uncover your gifts. Share your light. Leave a legacy.
Discovery is finding what you carry; distribution is the courage to give it away to the very places that once held you back.
The Five P's
The journey
Every woman's transformation with MEND follows a path: from what stirs her to what steadies her.
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Passion
It begins with what moves you. Let your mistakes become your source of inspiration and purpose; nothing in your story is wasted here.
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Purpose
Passion, examined, becomes purpose. Witness your life being fulfilled through what you were made to do.
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Plan
Purpose needs a path. Identify the right path, the right plan, and the right people to guide you.
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Production
Then the work begins: producing and sharing your purpose, so that what healed you becomes what heals others.
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Peace
And at the end of the path, ultimately, you discover the true meaning of peace.
The destination was never the point alone. The path is the promise.
Our Promise
Our core values
Everything MEND does revolves around mentorship: women lifting women, hand in hand, each one reaching forward to the woman ahead and back to the woman behind. We heal ourselves so that we can empower others. We empower others so that, together, we transform communities.
Heal yourself. Empower others. Transform communities. Walk with us.
Get InvolvedOur Founder
Mariama Suma-Keita was born in Yengema, in Sierra Leone's diamond country, and trained as a nurse in Freetown. When civil war reached her final year of school, she cared for the war's wounded and escaped carrying trauma of her own. Finding the courage to seek help became her first act of mending.
A diversity-visa award brought her to the United States with one suitcase and her nursing degree. When she saved her first five hundred dollars and sent it home, the light came on: the diamonds in her hands were no longer blood diamonds. They were real, and hers to make shine brighter.
Three decades into her nursing career, married to Ibrahim Suma-Keita and raising four children, she gathered the women around her into The MEND Experience: the seed of MEND. Her vision is simple: "Each one, reach one, bring one, teach one, all one, carry one."
"Are you a fountain or a drain?"
