By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 6, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Be honest. How many networking events have you left feeling like you wasted a good outfit?
Caitlyn Kumi did. So she did something about it.
The result is Miss EmpowHer, the women’s media platform and events community she founded in June 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, while she was still in college at UNC Chapel Hill. It started as an idea with no fully baked plan and has since grown into sold-out events across New York, DC, and Atlanta, where women show up not knowing who they’ll meet and leave with someone they may know for the rest of their careers.
Before all of this, Kumi was a Google marketer with a Forbes recognition and a career that looked right on paper. And despite coming from a Ghanaian-American household (if you know, you know), she decided to leave anyway. Not because it wasn’t working, but because Miss EmpowHer needed all of her and she knew it. Her Collective, the private membership community she just launched for 250 women, had over 3,000 on the waitlist before it even opened.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Kumi had a decision to make. “I have two choices,” she remembers thinking at the time. “I can delay my launch or I can continue and push forward.” She pushed. At UNC Chapel Hill she kept noticing the same thing, younger students with no real way in. So she built an internship program through Miss EmpowHer and startedsrc="https://media.essence.com/vxcjywbwpa/uploads/2026/04/F7274C46-0125-4949-B489-AF7298FB9D06.jpeg" alt="How Caitlyn Kumi Built Miss EmpowHer Into The Go-To Community For Ambitious Black Women" width="400" height="266" />
The 3,000-woman waitlist didn’t come from a single viral moment. Kumi has spent years going through every DM, every comment, and every post-event feedback form because she wanted to know what women were actually asking for in real time. What they kept telling her was that the big events were fun but the smaller ones felt more intentional. Women left those smaller rooms with referrals, collaborators, and connections that actually turned into opportunities.
“Women who are extremely ambitious, especially in major metropolitan areas like New York, DC, Atlanta are really discerning when it comes to their time and their money,” she says. That discernment is part of why Her Collective doesn’t look like a traditional networking community. Some events are Pilates classes. Others are just women walking together, with their phones down and actually conversing with each other. Kumi believes self-care is the first thing ambitious Black women let go of on the way up and she wasn’t interested in building another community that treated it like an afterthought.
None of this runs on Kumi alone. There is her PR lead Courtney, her sister on strategy and operations, a rotating group of interns, and the women in her community who talk about Miss EmpowHer in rooms she is never in. Kumi herself is an introvert who takes one full weekend a month to just stay home, and she has built things deliberately enough that she can.
The stories that come back to her are what keep her going. “Seeing a woman who come to me and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, your advice helped me open my first investment account or helped me pay off my credit card debt or now I was able to secure my first angel investor after attending your event. I’ve been looking for a job for months, but I was able to secure a referral from someone who I met at a Miss Empower event.'” She pauses. “It truly brings me so much joy no matter how tired I am. I don’t know what it is. Maybe, I don’t know if it’s God speaking to me, my purpose, I don’t know.”
“If the girlies in her collective are paying,” she says, “they need the best.”
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