Emerging 100 of Atlanta’s Diriki T. Geuka Shares Thoughts on Empowering the Next Generation

Diriki T. Geuka is an Associate in the Atlanta office of Townsend & Lockett in the transactional practice group. Diriki works on a team focusing on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and general corporate law.  Diriki was previously a Pinellas Assistant County Attorney where he represented County agencies run by locally elected and appointed officials. Diriki began his career as federal staff attorney for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where he served for a year, and was an intern for the Honorable Julie S. Sneed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida while in law school. Diriki was president of Stetson University College of Law’s Student Bar Association before graduating in 2017 with the Dean Richard Dillon Excellence in Real Property and Marc L. Levine Awards.  Diriki is a frequent mentor, community volunteer, and currently serves as a member of Morris Brown’s President’s Advisory Board.

Geuka, is also president of the Emerging 100 of Atlanta, the official young professional auxiliary of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta. The organization is comprised of high-achieving young men, aged 25-35, committed to the academic and vocational success of our youth at B.E.S.T. Academy High School and the Collegiate 100, while serving the Atlanta community as a whole.

The respected and accomplished community leader recently spoke with ADW to discuss the impact of this year’s event.

How did The Emerging 100 of Atlanta come about?

The Emerging 100 is the young professional auxiliary of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta. We have about 140 volunteer members who pay dues to go out and do good work in the community. The 100 Black men of Atlanta has a mission of enhancing the lives of local children, specifically those from disadvantaged backgrounds and we focus on an area of the city where the vast majority of the children come from households that are beneath the federal poverty line. And we’re all well aware of that statistic in Atlanta that if you’re a child born in poverty, you have about a 4% chance of making it out. And for a city with this much wealth, this many large corporations, this many institutions of higher learning, that’s just an issue. And in our 14 year history, we’ve given away over a half a million dollars in direct scholarship to about 57 students. That are either graduating from school or have graduated or in school right now. And we spent multiples of that on programming for thousands of children over a decade history.

How did you get involved with the Emerging 100?

I moved to Atlanta to work for the federal government in 2017,  I’m an attorney by trade. So I didn’t know too much about the social scene here. And the professionals I met recommended that I look into the 100 Black Men of Atlanta. As fate would have it, a friend that I went to FAMU with also shared with me that they were doing some social fundraising and made the introduction with other like-minded brothers. And so I began to support and help the organization. A couple of years later, I became president.

What can attendees expect from “THE DREAM: A Vision for Atlanta’s Future”?

Atlanta is a group project. I think Jay Bailey is the person I heard popularized that term over at RICE. So we’ve made it our mission to be more collaborative to reach out to other organizations. And we’re so lucky to live in a city like Atlanta, where our mayor and other elected leaders and civil servants care a lot about children and want to do some volunteering. We have a lofty goal. And that money will be repurposed and put back into the community to help out local children and I think it’s going to be very fun.