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John Onwuchekwa is a thinker, storyteller, and social entrepreneur whose work explores how people move through grief, meaning-making, and human flourishing. He studies how emotions shape culture and how culture shapes us back—and turns those insights into frameworks that help individuals and institutions grow stronger, healthier, and more resilient.
As Founder of WE GO ON, he develops ideas, experiences, and language for navigating loss and loneliness in a world that often avoids both. As a strategist, John helps organizations build narratives, systems, and environments that foster belonging and psychological safety.His creative work spans books, film, curriculum, and convenings.
His entrepreneurial work spans coffee, community building, and cultural design. And his life work centers on metabolizing everyday pain into everyday practices that make humans more whole.
John doesn’t just talk about ideas, he builds narratives, teams, and experiences that make them real.
Through ventures like Portrait Coffee, We Go On, and the multi-city We Go On Tour, he designs projects that rewire how people relate to grief, creativity, narrative and each other. Across all of his work, a single through-line emerges: create environments where everyday people reclaim agency, rewrite harmful narratives, and rediscover hope. John’s ventures function as laboratories for cultural innovation, exploring how storytelling, ritual, art, and collective practice can heal people and strengthen communities.
The through line is clear: build what the future needs before the world notices it’s missing.
Changing the picture that comes to mind when people think of speciality coffee. We poured a new narrative into specialty coffee by centering the faces and stories that were cropped out for far too long. Portrait reminds the world that dignity, belonging, and representation can be brewed into something as simple as a cup.
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In We Go On, John reminds you that tragic endings pave the way to new beginnings.
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My daily act of hopeful defiance. Honest stories and conversations about grief, creativity, and what it means to keep going when it still feels dark outside. It’s a companion for anyone trying to make it to sunrise.
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A live experience where grief and joy meet each other on purpose, through story, music, laughter, and shared presence. These nights turn life’s dead ends into new beginnings and remind people they’re not alone.
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Every life is shaped by the stories we inherit, the ones we resist, and the ones we eventually choose to tell. For John, grief wasn’t a theory but a turning point. Losing his brother Sam, set him on an unexpected path: understanding why we break, how we heal, and what it means to metabolize grief into something beautiful. That journey became the foundation of his work today. John studies the emotional, cultural, and relational forces that form people, especially the fractures we rarely name but always feel. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and storytelling, helping communities transform grief into resilience and loneliness into belonging. If you want to understand the ideas shaping him, start here.
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How we think influences how we interpret the world. John invites you to consider windows into his perspective via short-form writing. Brew a cup of coffee, settle into a favorite chair, and savor what he has to say.
Take me there
