On becoming NOIR Labs.

NOIR Labs was delivered and christened in a small room at Tsai City in May of 2019, but the genesis of the vision began 14 years prior in a Miami church when its founder had a transformative spiritual encounter. Through a series of life-altering events that would spurn deep personal growth, Lolade Siyonbola would come to integrate her computer science training and innate artistic gifts with her radical political and spiritual views, to craft a vision that would allow for all of her most disparate parts to thrive, while offering her beloved Black Diaspora the same.

Lolade founded the first incarnation of NOIR Labs, Exodus to Africka, with a few friends while living in Anaheim, California in 2006. At the time, it was to be a collective of African Diaspora professionals who would organize to ship medical and computer equipment to Africa. Due to conflicting values, the group would not last long, but Lolade held onto the dream of creating an exodus of African talent back to the Continent she called home.

Later, after quitting her job as a Network Engineer consulting for hedge funds in New York, she started a sequence of African-centered entrepreneurial pursuits, but was ultimately forced to go back to corporate in order to make a sufficient living. Throughout this time, Exodus to Africka became an elusive dream. It would materialize through her writings, social events and spoken word, eventually launching the Yoruba Cultural Institute, a community of Yoruba learners and teachers, and the Nollywood Diaspora Film Series, a platform featuring the highest quality Nollywood films available.

She arrived at Yale in 2017 with one question: how can I turn this dream into a profitable platform serving the Diaspora’s needs for fun and accessible African language and cultural instruction, community building and economic liberation? Classes at the Yale School of Management helped her gain clarity on optimal business development strategies, programs through the Council of African Studies and the Afro-American Cultural Center helped her test her unconventional community building strategies and her graduate research helped her to better understand the needs of the population she wished to serve.

In the aftermath of Sleeping While Black, after hosting Yale’s first ever Africa Film Festival (YAFF), her plethora of Liberationist ideas began to fall into place. During a debrief with the YAFF planning team, it became clear that the traveling film festival idea would serve an urgent need for aspirational Black storytelling not just from Africa, but also from South America, Europe, South Asia and the rest of the Black world. She began to test the idea out on friends and classmates and was overwhelmed by the excitement it elicited. Feeling led to develop it fully, she decided to take it on and reached out to potential collaborators. NOIR FEST was born.

In the process of applying to the Gates Cambridge scholarship, Lolade was challenged to integrate all of her ideas for global Black empowerment into one vision. It was then that she realized that the content and community from NOIR FEST could directly feed into the cultural database idea (later named the African Digital Institute), which could then feed into the vision for a network of African schools.

In addition to the Gates Cambridge, she applied and was accepted into several other programs that would be instrumental in allowing her the space and resources to fully develop her ideas, cultivating the teams and networks that would support her in building the institution that would come to be known as NOIR Labs. These included the Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance, Yale’s Tsai CITY Spring Accelerator and the Tsai CITY Summer Fellowship, among others.

In May of 2019, Lolade approached contemporaries in her graduating class and larger network and, from her passion and vision, was able to recruit three people to volunteer their time long term to develop the organization. NOIR Labs was born.