I am Dydine. I was born in Rwanda, I survived the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi as a child, and I have spent my life since learning how people come back from what should have ended them. I write, I speak, and I build rooms where strangers become kind to one another.
Every Sunday I send one letter called Dear Humanity. It is about the small lessons and beautiful accidents of being alive. Come read it, and if you want me in a room with your people, tell me about them.
Keynotes & Workshops
Dydine Umunyana Anderson speaks about what people do after the worst thing
Every room holds someone who is rebuilding something. Three talks, shaped to the audience in front of her, each one ending with something people can carry into Monday.
What Grows Back
“My grandmother let her fields rest for a year when the soil was tired, and everyone told her she was wasting a season. The next year she grew more than anyone.” She opens with Rwanda and ends with the practical question every organization is actually asking: how do people and institutions come back after something breaks them, and what does it cost the person leading them.
Audiences leave with a way to talk about hard seasons out loud, and a sharper sense of what recovery requires of leadership.
Leadership summits · Corporate and association conferences · Employee and ERG programs · Orientation and convocation
The Room Where We Listen
Dydine has watched strangers become neighbors in an hour, and it happens the same way every time. Someone tells the truth about themselves and someone else recognizes it. The talk is about what that does to a classroom, a team, a whole community, and how to build the conditions for it on purpose rather than by luck.
Audiences leave able to name what belonging actually requires, and with a practice they can run in their own rooms.
Universities and colleges · Culture and belonging programs · Museums and civic institutions · Education conferences
Taking Your Peace Back
Forgiveness gets talked about as a feeling that arrives. In Rwanda it was a thing people did, deliberately, next door to what had been done to them, because the alternative was a country that stayed broken. Dydine speaks about forgiveness as a discipline rather than a mood, and about what it makes possible once a person stops carrying the weight.
Audiences leave with a clear distinction between forgiving and forgetting, and with permission to put something down.
Women's leadership conferences · Healthcare and caregiving · Faith communities · Conflict resolution and law enforcement training
From the Dear Humanity Letter
“The part of you that comes back is not the part that died. It comes up from underneath, from somewhere you did not know was still alive.”
Rooms that have hosted me
Dydine Umunyana Anderson has given keynotes and talks at Harvard Kennedy School, Talks at Google, Cornell University, TEDx Cornell University, Meta, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and the University of San Diego.
Testimonials
Let’s work together
If you want me in a room with your people, this is where to start.