A Roman philosopher once said, “ Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Connecting Communities, a new program from JFCS’s Navigate Enterprise Center, exemplifies this message by turning the preparation we do with our clients every day into an opportunity to create life-changing experiences. Through a bit of luck, JFCS began working with the Fund for the Arts NeXt …
View this on WLKY. https://www.wlky.com/article/mosaic-awards-to-pay-tribute-to-first-generation-immigrants-making-a-difference/27445709
JFCS has been providing assistance to microbusinesses for more than 20 years. In 1995, the program started with funding from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement to give newly arrived refugees the opportunity to explore self-employment through microenterprise development as a viable means to financial self-sufficiency. Since then, it has grown into the Navigate Enterprise Center. Services have expanded to …
Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Fred Gross was a toddler when Nazi Germany began targeting the Jews in Europe. His family escaped the genocide of millions of Jews, and they found freedom on the Norfolk, Virginia, docks in 1946. Years later while on a trip to Europe in 1984, Fred’s wife, Carolyn, started questioning family members and began to piece together …
Surekha Kulkarni is a social entrepreneur, jewelry designer and founder and program director of Beaded Treasures Project. When Surekha moved from India to Louisville in 1986, she did so to help her son Nikhil, who has dyslexia and the schools in India were not able to make the needed accommodations. “We felt like we had no choice and so we …
Passover is my holiday of remembering — the one that brings me back to Seder tables with the immigrants and first generations of my own family. They spoke Yiddish and English — equal parts separate from, and bound up with, America. Some at the table owned small neighborhood businesses that did just well enough to get by. Others grew enterprises …
Keisha Deonarine was born in Trinidad, stating “our ancestry is Indian, and we have a lot of Indian culture, but we are West Indian or Caribbean Indian. as well.” Her family moved to Brooklyn, NY, when she was 3 years old, and then to Fort Lauderdale, FL, when her parents “realized that there’s a cold winter [in New York].” She …
James Racine, known to most as Maestro J, grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Both of his parents were musicians and educators; his father, a flutist/composer/conductor, and his mother, an educator/violinist. Beginning at the age of 4, Maestro J learned to play the violin, mostly by ear, and later also learned to play the piano and flute. As a child, scholarships …
Purna Veer grew up the son of a farmer near Hyderabad, located in southern India. He moved to the United States in 1997 “with a single suitcase.” Raised as a Renaissance man, Veer is a nationally recognized entrepreneur & business leader at the helm of V-Soft Consulting Group Inc., a software company started in 1997 & is one of the …
After working in retail for her whole life, Maggie Nelson knew that she needed a change. “I didn’t like retail anymore, and I got to a point where I also knew I couldn’t survive making that kind of money. A month after I finished working with a JFCS career counselor I put in an application for my current job at …
