Wangui Maina
IAS Residential Fellow
Finding Me Community
Wangui Maina is the Founder and CEO of Finding Me Community (FMC), a youth-led organisation embedding preventive, peer-led mental health systems across 33 public universities in East and Central Africa. Her work sits at the intersection of public health, higher education, community psychology, and African philosophy, advancing SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and SDG 4 (Quality Education) through culturally grounded, student-owned models of care.
Wangui's leadership is rooted in lived experience. While studying economics at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, she experienced severe anxiety within a structurally overwhelmed counselling system one of four counsellors serving over 30,000 students. That encounter with institutional failure became the foundation of her life's work.
Since launching FMC in 2021, she has trained 1009 student mental health champions, served over 5,000 young people through structured peer-led programming, and achieved reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms of up to 40% across seven completed cohorts. FMC's model is informed by the African philosophy of Ubuntu the understanding that wellbeing is a collective responsibility and uses structured peer dialogue to actively reshape campus norms around help-seeking and mental health meaning-making across six dimensions of psychosocial maturation: self-awareness, gratitude, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and self-care.
Wangui serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at Shamiri Institute, contributes to Kenya's national youth mental health policy consortium, and sits on the planning committee for Kenya's National Mental Health Walk. In 2025, she received four international awards from CitiesRISE, including the Innovation in Youth Mental Health Award. She holds training in psychology and leadership from DePaul University.
During their IAS Fellowship, Wangui will be collaborating with Dr Jessica Robles from the Department of Communication and Media.