Four women of different ages walking and talking together on a Paris street in soft afternoon light

MANY LIVES LATER

Different countries.Different careers.Different versions of ourselves.Many lives later, somehow, Paris.

And here we are.

Many Lives Later brings together women who have lived enough to have something to share — and are curious enough to know there is more ahead.

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Paris · Founding membership opening

Many lives

We have been different women.In different cities. Different countries.Different careers. Different relationships.Some lives we chose. Some happened to us.Some we loved. Some we were relieved to leave behind.

We learned things. We met people. We accumulated stories, instincts, skills, contacts, mistakes, knowledge and questions.

And somehow: here we are.

Imagine putting all of that in one room.

Second life? Some of us have lost count.

What this is

Community is the consequence. Not the whole product.

Not a networking group.
People whose lives are genuinely interesting.
Not an events calendar.
A social life, built over a year.
Not a coaching programme.
A room that thinks with you.
Not a circle of strangers.
A group that gets to know one another properly.
Not Paris for visitors.
Paris through women who actually live it.
Not what you can extract.
What can circulate.

Every woman here arrives carrying what her lives have given her: expertise, relationships, cultural intelligence, information, mistakes already made, systems already navigated. Individually, each of us holds a part of it. Together, the pool is something else entirely.

Many Lives Later is the social infrastructure that lets those resources move between us.

The proposition

What happens when we get in the same room?

Three dimensions, designed to reinforce one another. None of them works particularly well alone.

One

Belonging

People worth knowing.

Having acquaintances is not the same as belonging. You can have colleagues, old friends scattered across three continents, WhatsApp groups, school-gate acquaintances and several hundred LinkedIn connections — and still have nowhere you actually want to be on a Thursday evening.

  • Gatherings that repeat, so faces become people.
  • Small tables before large rooms.
  • Enough time to move past the first three questions.
  • The same women again, which is how anything real starts.

We create the conditions. What happens between people is theirs.

Two

Exchange

Lives worth drawing from.

Every woman arrives with resources accumulated across her different lives. The point is to make them useful to someone else — not as transactional networking, but as structured reciprocity.

  • Advice from someone who has already done it.
  • An introduction that would have taken you two years.
  • The name of the right lawyer, school, doctor, framer, agent.
  • Perspective from a woman who sees your problem differently.
  • What not to do, from someone who did it.

You do not need to personally own every resource you might need, if you belong to a group that shares intelligently what it collectively knows.

Three

Experience

Reasons worth showing up for.

Things worth leaving the house for. Not networking cocktails with name badges.

  • Dinners in places you would not have found.
  • Private cultural visits, out of hours.
  • Salons built around one difficult question.
  • Someone fascinating, in a small room, unrehearsed.
  • The occasional evening that goes slightly off-plan.

The luxury is not the champagne. It is the quality of the room.

The principle

The tontine, adapted.

A traditional tontine works on contribution and rotation: members contribute regularly, and one member benefits from the pool at a time. Simple, old, and unreasonably effective.

Many Lives Later borrows the architecture and changes what is pooled. Instead of money, we pool what our lives have given us.

  • Knowledge
  • Experience
  • Relationships
  • Ideas
  • Perspective
  • Introductions
  • Skills
  • Access
  • Information

At selected moments, one woman brings something real.

  • A decision.
  • A transition.
  • A project she wants to build.
  • An ambition she has not said out loud.
  • A professional problem.
  • A move.
  • A question she cannot solve alone.

And the room asks: what do I have that could move her forward?

  • One woman has done exactly this before.
  • Another knows precisely the right person.
  • Someone sees the problem from an angle nobody offered.
  • Someone knows what not to do, because she already did it.
  • Someone has the information.
  • Someone asks the question nobody thought to ask.

Which means the question is never only “what can I get from this room?” — it is also “what am I carrying that could be useful here?”

A signature format

The Tontine

One woman. One real question. The resources of the room.

Not every gathering is a Tontine — there are dinners, salons, visits and evenings with no agenda at all. But The Tontine is the ritual that belongs to us. One member becomes the focus, brings something she genuinely wants to move forward, and the others contribute whatever is relevant from their accumulated lives.

Concentrated usefulness, rather than performative advice.

Reciprocity

And what do you bring?

Most membership sites spend their time telling you what you will receive. This one would also like to ask the other question.

  • Not money.
  • Not status.
  • Not a follower count.
  • Not an impressive title.
  1. 01

    What have your lives taught you?

  2. 02

    What have you seen up close?

  3. 03

    What do you understand unusually well?

  4. 04

    Who might benefit from something you know?

  5. 05

    Which doors could you help someone navigate?

  6. 06

    What mistake could you save another woman from making?

  7. 07

    What question are you excellent at asking?

  8. 08

    What have you learned simply by living?

Nobody is asked to perform expertise. But a room only stays interesting if the people in it arrive willing to give something to it.

The first year

A year, not twelve events.

  1. 01

    Arrive

    Apply, and join the founding group.

  2. 02

    Be known

    Tell us about the lives you have lived. It is how we know who you might want to meet.

  3. 03

    Meet your first table

    Your first gathering is small and deliberately composed.

  4. 04

    Sit down properly

    Dinners and salons across the year, in Paris.

  5. 05

    Bring something to the Tontine

    At some point, take the seat and ask the room for what you need.

  6. 06

    Be useful

    And at some other point, be the one with the contact, the experience or the better question.

  7. 07

    Discover

    Places, people and invitations you would not have found on your own.

  8. 08

    Host something

    Members open their own worlds: a studio, a table, an obsession, a neighbourhood.

  9. 09

    Look back

    At the end of the year, notice what has changed.

Who are you becoming now?

A year might look like

A small group of women in conversation in a light-filled Paris artist studio
  • A dinner that ends four hours after it was supposed to.
  • Six women in an artist's studio after closing time.
  • A message at 4pm: “The weather is ridiculous. Drinks at 7?”
  • A Tontine where three people solve in an hour what you sat on for a year.
  • An introduction you would never have engineered yourself.
  • A tiny restaurant nobody in your usual circle knows.
  • A conversation about money that is not really about money.
  • An invitation into another member's world.
  • A summer table that lasts much longer than planned.
  • A goodbye dinner when somebody leaves the city.
  • A book pressed into your hand because “you need this right now”.
  • A woman you would never have met becoming the one you call first.

We can design the conditions. We cannot design the friendships. That is rather the point.

The Little Black Book

The knowledge you normally spend years accumulating.

Slowly, and only from real experience, the members build a trusted address book: the practical intelligence of women who have already worked it out.

“She would go back.” is the standard.

Not sponsored. Not scraped. Recommended by someone who has actually used it.

  • doctors
  • hairdressers who understand your hair
  • lawyers
  • accountants
  • immigration
  • schools
  • teenagers
  • tutors
  • restaurants
  • places to dance after 40
  • seamstresses
  • photographers
  • specialty food
  • galleries
  • weekend escapes
  • household help

Members as the experience

Eventually, the women become the programme.

A community should not revolve permanently around one host. Members contain entire worlds of their own.

  • A curator introduces an artist.
  • A fashion executive opens a door that is usually closed.
  • A woman who grew up here shows us her actual neighbourhood.
  • A wine obsessive hosts six women around one table.
  • Someone organises dancing.
  • Someone knows the chef.
  • Someone knows the story behind the building.
  • Someone simply knows the right place.

The founder

Arlette has lived a few lives herself.

Portrait of Arlette Ngo Badjeck seated in a light-filled room with a laptop and a coffee cup

Born in Cameroon. Raised between Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. Studied in the United States. Many years in Tunisia. Work and life across a long list of African countries. Now France.

The moving is not the interesting part. Plenty of people move.

The interesting part is what she kept doing wherever she landed: gathering people around ideas, experiences and resources — and then watching what those people did with each other.

TEDxCadjehounWomen, Benin

For four years she organised TEDxCadjehounWomen: finding voices worth listening to, convincing women to say the thing they had never said publicly, filling a room with people who would otherwise never have met, and letting the conversations spill into the corridor. It was, in retrospect, an early version of the same instinct — curiosity turned into a gathering.

My Sister's Keeper

During COVID she created My Sister's Keeper, a circle of Afro-descendant women built on the structure of the African tontine. Instead of pooling money, they pooled everything else. The group rotated: each month, one woman became the beneficiary. She brought a problem, a question, a project, a challenge. The others brought advice, expertise, contacts, introductions, recommendations, information, experience.

The contribution was not financial. It was collective resourcefulness.

For years these things looked unrelated.

A TEDxWomen stage in Benin. A resource-sharing circle during a pandemic. Dinners. Travel. Introductions. Rooms. Questions. Countries.

Then the pattern became difficult to miss.

She has spent her adult life building environments where people, ideas and resources that would otherwise stay separate manage to find each other.

Many Lives Later is the most complete version of that so far. It is not a remake of My Sister's Keeper — it takes one of its insights and builds something broader around it: a group of women collectively holds far more than any one woman can hold alone.

Beginning small

The Founding Members

The first membership is deliberately small.

Not because small is automatically better. Because relationships need repetition. Because people need time to become familiar. Because the culture of a community is set by whoever is there first — and because a group of women who genuinely know one another can do things 500 names in a database cannot.

Founding members will help shape

  • the rituals
  • the Tontine format
  • the gatherings
  • the norms
  • the Little Black Book
  • what this becomes next

The founding members will set the culture for everyone who follows.

Apply to be a founding member

Who this is for

You may recognise yourself here.

There is no profile to match. Women approximately 35 and up, though age is not the identity. What tends to be true is that you have lived in more than one world — literally or otherwise — and you are still curious about the next one.

  • internationally mobile, or formerly so
  • Third Culture, immigrant, diaspora, returnee, expatriate or repatriated
  • internationally minded, even if you have never left
  • professionally experienced, in whatever form that took
  • culturally curious, and interested in people unlike you
  • in the middle of another transition, or just out of one
  • rebuilding a social life here
  • living between cultures, and fluent in beginning again
  • generous with introductions, ideas and attention
  • able to both ask for help and offer it

Probably not the right room if

  • you are mainly here for leads
  • you want a channel to promote a business
  • you prefer large anonymous events
  • you are looking for coaching or therapy
  • you are primarily after status or proximity to influence
  • you are not especially interested in people unlike yourself
  • you need every evening to produce a measurable return
  • you think community is something other people should provide

The filter is simpler than a résumé

  • Has she lived?
  • Is she curious?
  • Does she listen?
  • Does she contribute?
  • Is she interested in people different from herself?
  • Can she ask for help as easily as she offers it?
  • Would dinner be better because she was there?

A small manifesto

The room we are trying to build.

Curiosity
We ask before we assume.
Generosity
Good rooms are built by people who bring something to them.
Complexity
Nobody has to flatten herself into a single identity here.
Discretion
Stories stay. Lessons travel.
Pleasure
Life does not have to become a self-improvement project to matter.

Stories stay. Lessons travel.

The community is designed for real conversation, which only works if it is safe. Carry the ideas and the lessons with you. A personal story told by another member is never repeated in an identifiable way without her permission — online or off.

Questions

Before you apply.

The application

Apply to be a founding member

This is not a test and there are no correct answers.

We want to understand who you are beyond a résumé, what your different lives have given you, and what kind of room you are looking for.

Applications are read personally.

Applying creates no financial obligation. If there is a strong mutual fit, we will invite you to a short conversation and share the founding membership details before anything is confirmed.

1 of 5 · About you

First, the easy part.

How long have you lived in or around Paris?

We are not starting from scratch.

We arrived carrying everything our previous lives gave us. Now let us see what happens when we put it all in the same room.

  • Some of these women will become dinner companions.
  • Some will open a door.
  • Some will make you laugh until it is embarrassing.
  • Some will disagree with you usefully.
  • One or two will become the people you call first.
Apply to join

Applications are open for the first Paris group.

Apply to join