Thank you so much Ms. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and the Institute of Politics. This is an incredible honor to receive the New Frontier Award.
As you know, Upwardly Global’s work is on the frontier of immigration. The great injustice of immigration today is not about who welcome to our shores and who we keep out, it is that we welcome people and fail to take advantage of all they have to offer us. America is the land of opportunity, without qualifier. And yet for so many new immigrants with skills America is the land of opportunity only for their children, and not for them.
In President Kennedy’s book, A Nation of Immigrants, he speaks of the benefits of integration, of embracing each new generation of immigrants that arrives. He wrote “yesterday’s immigrants supplied a continuous flow of creative abilities and ideas that have enriched our nation. The immigrants we welcome today and tomorrow will carry on this tradition and help us to retain, reinvigorate, and strengthen the American spirit. Reinvigorate he said. And Strengthen. In my experience, this is just as true today as when he wrote those words in 1958. Upwardly Global has worked with new immigrants from 66 countries in the developing world. They are from places like Colombia, Afghanistan, Benin, Peru, Mongolia and Cameroon. These new immigrants are ambitious, college-educated, well-experienced, brimming with creative abilities and ideas – and yet while the door to America is open to them, the door to career opportunity in America is not.
In 1996 I was working for a national refugee resettlement organization and I was touring a chicken processing plant which was considered a model employer of refugees. The owner of the company was showing me around and he stopped to introduce me to two of his best employees. The owner mentioned that one of them had been an engineer in Iraq and the other a surgeon in Bosnia. I couldn’t help but be stunned that their journey to freedom had ended here, skinning chickens and separating drumsticks. Not one part of those chickens was wasted, but no one was addressing the wasted human potential
The prevailing wisdom was that refugees would never work in their career fields again. In fact, the system was designed to divest these new Americans of any hope of being a doctor or engineer, and to get them to accept their rightful place on the cutting line. Well I reject that. Why shouldn’t immigrant Americans be able to use the talents and leadership they bring with them?
I started Upwardly Global because we must do better and we can do better. At first I thought that the problem was that new immigrants just didn’t know the American system and that’s why they weren’t able to break into mainstream white collar jobs. I soon realized the problem was the American system.
At any given time there are between 250,000 – 500,000 immigrant professionals with bachelors or masters’ degrees who are woefully underemployed.
It is clearly not a problem of the individual.
Our job search system in the US is obtuse and rigid and expects people to have a one page resume of action verbs and to be shamelessly self-promotional in interviews. This is truly foreign to immigrant jobseekers whose cultures value humility and modesty. Immigrants know how to do the job but they just can’t find the job. On the other side, companies need motivated and talented people and their competitiveness hinges on having a skilled workforce to meet the challenges of the global marketplace and the knowledge economy. And yet, they are missing out on this talent pool entirely. We realized that it was not enough to help a few immigrants to rebuild their careers, we need to change the system.
Upwardly Global is a little nonprofit, clearly we can’t solve that problem alone. So we started asking the biggest companies, the Fortune 1000, to do the right thing for their business and the right thing for immigrant Americans. After many years of asking companies to embrace this vision, this year some of the biggest companies said yes. JP Morgan Chase, a company of 170,000 employees, is one company that was forward-thinking and saw that they could use their influence and leadership to change the employment landscape for immigrant Americans. They also understood that they would increase their competitiveness by making their workforce more globally diverse. We need more companies to step forward and embrace the idea of an upwardly global workforce.
One day immigrant inclusion will just be the way business is done.
That takes time.
Until that long-term change happens, we also focus on creating success stories today. We have helped more than 400 New Americans get their careers back on track. We have helped them increase their family incomes by an average of $18,000 annually, but what’s more important is that they get back to the work they love and where they are best suited to contribute. Upwardly Global is at an important inflection point. We expanded to open a NYC city office this year and we want to expand exponentially to help more than 4,000 immigrant leaders rebuild their careers in the next three years.
These success stories are what inspire me on a daily basis - I’d love to tell you about just a few of them:
There’s Christopher Tun, a political asylee from Burma who managed outsourced IT projects for IBM. When he approached us he was a cab driver. We helped him to get a job as a management consultant for BearingPoint about a year ago. I saw him again recently at a mock interview session for our jobseekers. This time he was there as a volunteer, to give the practice interviews and share what he has learned with our current jobseekers.
Daria Tsundary was a broadcaster in Mongolia, an anchor and reporter on the nightly news. She spent years researching and producing an expose on the corruption of the Communist government. In retaliation, the Communists killed her husband. She fled to the US, leaving her two kids behind with her parents. Before she came to Upwardly Global she worked serving cappuccinos at a café. We helped her get a job doing research and production at the local CBS TV station. Shortly after that she decided that she wanted more people to know about the struggles immigrant professionals face. She got a cameraman to donate his time and the two of them spent 8 days filming to produce a video about Upwardly Global. CNN recently did a segment on Upwardly Global, and they used Daria’s video to tell the story.
Faith Chege was a social worker in Kenya for 15 years and was forced to leave because she was teaching women in prison to run their own businesses. It seems that economic equality for women was unpopular with the growing fundamentalist movement in Kenya. You would think that after all the hardship she suffered for her work, that she would want to do something different in the US. But she couldn’t even consider it. Her passion is social work and after a few years as a nanny, she came to Upwardly Global and we helped her find a social work position in Richmond, CA a low-income city in the Bay Area. 1 ½ years after coming to the US, Faith was honored by the San Francisco Foundation with an award for her community activism.
There are so many more stories. When we help immigrant professionals to find an open door to career opportunity, their instinct, their strongest impulse, is to open the door for the next person. There are many people beyond myself who have been involved in wrenching open that first door, through their commitment, their vision and their creativity. We have more than 300 Americans who volunteer with us to mentor our jobseekers one by one, teach our jobseeker workshops and who work within companies to encourage colleagues to be more immigrant inclusive.
And of course, the people who do the real work are the 13 members of the Upwardly Global team, who every day work to get us closer to reaching our goals. In particular I want to recognize and thank my wonderful and amazing colleague, Camille Ramani, Upwardly Global’s COO, who is here today. When she started at Upwardly Global 4 years ago it was just three of us and barely a program. She has been the driving force behind developing our programs for immigrant jobseekers, and building the organization. Her commitment to the mission is deep and impressive.
There are so many students here today and many of you are at the point where you are trying to figure out what you want to do with your lives. The time to begin your career in public service is now. Public service is too important to delay until you have more money or time or the student loans are paid off or kids are in school, or the kids are out of school, or you are retired. While I believe in taking calculated risks, I do not believe in gambling. Waiting for some day to serve the community, to stretch yourself and to try to make a difference is a gamble. We don’t know if we have some day but we all have today.
I also want to let you in on a secret. I discovered that the best way to get rich is to pursue a career in public service. Your life will be rich in challenges and struggles, in puzzles that need to be solved, in people who inspire you, rich with colleagues who share your passion and rich, beyond your wildest dreams with purpose. It is a life rich with purpose. It is a privilege to do the work we do. I encourage all of you to find work that makes you rich in the same way.
Thank you again for this amazing honor and recognition of our work.
Remarks delivered by Jane Leu, Founder and Executive Director of Upwardly Global, on receiving the 2006 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, November 20, 2006.