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What Is Your American Dream? Radhika Reddy

As we celebrate the opening of American Dreams earlier this month at Cleveland Public Theatre, we're spending time learning about the American dreams of those in our community. Even a few that have come true.

This week we feature entrepreneur, real estate developer and philanthropist Radhika Reddy, Founder & Partner of Ariel Ventures, LLC, who has spent the past 30 years making significant contributions to Cleveland and the Greater Northeast Ohio community.   

“I came to the US from India with $20 in my pocket and a one-year scholarship to Case. After that year, I was supposed to go back to India. But I was fortunate to get a part time job, worked long hours, went to school full time and completed my MBA. My specialty was turning around troubled companies and helping them make multi-million dollar profits. My company did well. I’ve built it by working very hard, always learning and not being afraid to take risks.

I’m always looking for opportunities – for myself and for others. For a long time, my dream was to create this one-stop international center. My business partners and I bought a building by the lake and now it’s the Ariel International Center. We bring different ethnic groups together; we have events, meetings and build intercultural understanding. I’m now on my fifth building. We want to leave a legacy behind for Cleveland. We want to give back to the community that we’ve adopted.

The American Dream, for me, is the fact that you can come to this country with $20 and work hard, study and do a lot by yourself. You can truly make a difference. You can build something and make things happen that are transformative.” –Radhika Reddy, Founder, Ariel Ventures

Dig deep into the concept of the American dream and be a part of the live studio audience of American Dreams, where you will decide which of three contestants will receive the ultimate prize: citizenship in “the greatest nation on Earth.” Now playing through March 3 at Cleveland Public Theatre.

by Global Cleveland

Get Involved with Global Cleveland

Join us in welcoming and connecting International Newcomers to economic, professional and social opportunities in Greater Cleveland. Below are ways you can get involved – from helping international young professionals network with civic and business leaders to attending a naturalization ceremony. We look forward to working with you!

by Global Cleveland

InterCLE , A Spectacular Success!

The first InterCLE, a grand welcome for our international students, was a spectacular success. So, yes, we’re planning an encore.

• Attendance: 522
• Universities represented: Case Western, Cleveland State, Kent State, Akron, John Carroll, Baldwin Wallace, Tri C, Oberlin
• Nations represented: China, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, England, France, Italy, Greece, Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, Nigeria and many more
• Employers and institutions represented: 22, including Cleveland Clinic, BioEnterprise, Margaret Wong & Associates, Ariel Ventures, Greater Cleveland Chinese Chamber of Commerce
• Restaurants offering tastings: 9, including Li Wah, Ty Fun, Alladin’s
• Dynamic speakers: The crowd heard success stories from former international students and global business executives

Our aim: To tap the energy and expertise of the 6,000+ international students studying in Greater Cleveland. Most are pursuing advanced degrees, often in STEM fields. We want them to feel welcome here. We want them to launch companies and careers here.

Save the Date: InterCLE 2018 is scheduled for Saturday September 8, 2018

Do you wish to participate? There will be opportunities for sponsorships and information tables. Universities can hang their banners. Law firms, banks, insurance agencies and civic organizations are invited to display their services. Contact Courtney Ottrix at [email protected] 

by Global Cleveland

Giving Tuesday

At Global Cleveland, we pursue an uncommon quest. We try to attract International Newcomers to Cleveland and help them to pursue the American dream. We do this because we need their energy and we need their skills to repopulate our city and to compete in the global economy.

With anti-International Newcomer hostility rising nationally, our work has become more challenging—and vital. That’s why we need your help now more than ever.

Why you should consider donating to Global Cleveland this #GivingTuesday:

• 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies were International Newcomers or their children. This is why we engage high-skill International Newcomers at events like the 2017 International Student Pitch Contest. We want the next Fortune 500 company to be founded here.
  

• Global Cleveland’s citizenship initiatives, including our new Community Navigator program, guide International Newcomers toward naturalization, which contributes to their economic success and strengthens our community.

• With events like the Global Employer Summit, Global Cleveland helps local employers realize the opportunities presented by international talent.

• By matching International Newcomers with Welcome Mentors, we help newcomers like Monica Ceja from Mexico assimilate more rapidly, get started on a new career, and make Cleveland home.

• Through projects like International Village, Global Cleveland helps revitalize neighborhoods with Displaced Personss and migrants who need homes. On #GivingTuesday, support our efforts to strengthen Cleveland by welcoming the world. 

• We are a proud partner of Thomas Jefferson Newcomers Academy, Cleveland’s school for International Newcomer and migrant children. Help us help the next generation assimilate to their new home.

• International Newcomers and Displaced Personss are unusually entrepreneurial. We created a listing of International Newcomer and Displaced Persons Owned Businesses in Greater Cleveland so that people can find and support the authentic ethnic grocery stores, restaurants and services that International Newcomers create in our community.

by Global Cleveland

DESCENDANTS OF DISPLACED PERSONS OFFERED NEW GLIMPSE INTO THEIR International Newcomer ROOTS

The U.S. Holocaust Museum and Cleveland’s Ukrainian Museum Archives partner to create a searchable database that will be presented October 24.

If your family emigrated to Greater Cleveland from Europe after World War II, chances are they came from a Displaced Persons Camp. These were temporary settlements that housed millions of people uprooted by the war, including former POWs, Holocaust survivors and people forced to work as slave laborers in the Nazi Germany economy.

The camp experience became a big part of the International Newcomer odyssey for the “DPs”, as camp residents became known, yet it’s a story that has been largely hidden from their descendants. There was no easy way to trace people back to life in the DP camps--until now.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has created a searchable database of information on the Displaced Persons Camps and the people who passed through them. Earlier this year, the Holocaust Museum partnered with the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland to digitize the UMA’s extensive collection of DP Camp periodicals produced by Ukrainian Displaced Personss from 1945-51. Working with Kyiv-based Archival Data Systems, researchers have scanned more than 75,000 documents archived at the Tremont museum, creating a resource that scholars and others will now be able to access.

Officials from the Holocaust Museum will unveil the new resource and its search tools at a special presentation in Cleveland, a city that resettled thousands of displaced persons. “Solving the Mystery: Tracing Your Family’s Path from a Displaced Persons Camp,” starts at 6 p.m. Tuesday, October 24 at the Slovenian National Home, 6409 St. Clair Avenue.

The event is co-sponsored by Global Cleveland and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. Admission is free and light refreshments will be served.

Andrew Fedynsky, the director of the Ukrainian Museum Archives, promises an evening that could help complete many a family tree in Northeast Ohio.

Please RSVP to the Ukrainian Museum-Archives by calling 216 781-4329 or via e-mail [email protected]

by Global Cleveland

Cleveland community leaders call for rapid help, and a warm welcome, for Puerto Ricans in crisis

Cleveland, Ohio, October 9, 2017--The devastation and suffering in Puerto Rico breaks our hearts. Cleveland shares a long and special kinship with the commonwealth. Puerto Ricans are by far our largest Hispanic community. Many of us have friends and family in Puerto Rico, parents and sisters and brothers whom we know are in pain and maybe in peril.

Now is the time to put Cleveland’s welcoming tradition and policies into action. Puerto Rico needs help now. People need food and water and electricity. A shattered infrastructure must be rebuilt. We encourage three simultaneous approaches.

1. Help personally and immediately.

The Cleveland Foundation, in cooperation with Puerto Rican community groups, has set up a fund that will get aid to the right places as quickly as possible. Between now and Nov. 30, Greater Clevelanders can visit www.clevelandfoundation.org/puertorico to give online. All donations are to be transferred directly to the Puerto Rico Community Foundation (Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico) and specifically designated for hurricane relief efforts in the hardest hit areas throughout Puerto Rico.

2. Push the federal government to respond more vigorously.

Let us encourage our national leaders and representatives to expend all available resources to help fellow Americans in distress.

3. Embrace the unique role Cleveland can play.

Many Puerto Ricans will be looking to move to the mainland, for their own safety and for the health and wellbeing of their children. Hopefully, we can make Cleveland their first choice. Let’s put out the word that they are welcome here: that they will find familiar churches and shops and often relatives, certainly friends.

The economic implications for our region are significant as the city embraces our new arrivals. Housing, medical care, access to our already proven and strong human service network, and the leadership of agencies like the Spanish American Committee, would all serve to mitigate the emotional trauma and physical pain. Global Cleveland will put its Professional Connections services to work to seek job opportunities for the newcomers, many of whom will have bilingual skills.

For more than 60 years, our foundations have worked with the Puerto Rican community to create a foundation of strength and Boricua pride. In addition, Mayor Frank Jackson has declared Cleveland to be open to International Newcomers and Displaced Personss from everywhere. County Executive Armond Budish has made international outreach a key plank in the county’s economic development plan. Our Governor, John Kasich, speaks eloquently of the contributions of International Newcomers and the need to more assertively welcome newcomers to Ohio.

Let’s start with our brothers and sisters suddenly in need. Let’s help Puerto Rico heal. But let’s not be afraid to say “Bienvenidos de Cleveland,” and welcome new neighbors.

Puerto Rico is the United States. It is all of our obligation as residents of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and Northeast Ohio to act in a manner aligned with our shared values and love of our families.

Sincerely,

Joe Cimperman

President, Global Cleveland

Armond Budish

Cuyahoga County Executive

Jose Feliciano Sr.,

President, The Hispanic Roundtable

by Global Cleveland

Outdated Migration System No Longer Works

At a Chautauqua-style forum in Chagrin Falls, experts discussed the tensions raised by Migration issues--and why Migration reform is badly needed.

By Aaron Davis

America has changed remarkably since the 1960s, but our Migration system remains much the same--a collection of policies and laws designed for a different era.

That was a key message delivered at a recent forum in Chagrin Falls, where experts emphasized the need for Migration reform.

“In America in the ’60s, if you owned a hardware store here in Chagrin Falls, your biggest competitor was the person across the street,” Migration attorney David Leopold said to the audience gathered in the sanctuary of The Federated Church. “Now, if you’re in hardware, your biggest competitor may be someone in Paris, or in Brussels, or somewhere else.”

Leopold sounded tired of explaining it, or tired of repeating it.  But he went on to add, “We are a global economy, but we are living under an Migration law designed for America in the 1960s.”

America’s Migration system is broken, he said. The sooner we fix it, the sooner we will stop hurting business and stop tearing apart families with mean-spirited deportations.

The Chautauqua-in-Chagrin series, sponsored by Chagrin Arts, tackled the controversial topic of Migration July 11. About 50 people attended the forum at the landmark church.

The panel, moderated by Global Cleveland President Joe Cimperman, included two Clevelanders intimately familiar with Migration rules and realities: Leopold and Judge Dan Polster.  Polster is a federal judge for the U.S. District Court who often presides over naturalization ceremonies. He also worked as a visiting judge in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a little over 40 miles from the Mexican border, sentencing mostly individuals involved in illegal border crossings.

Judge Polster opened his remarks by noting that, while Migration today presents new complexities, the fears and anxieties that International Newcomers raise are quite familiar.

“The tension between liberty and security is as old as our country,” he said.  “When we are in crisis, when we are afraid, the pendulum swings towards security.  When we feel safe, the pendulum swings toward liberty.”

Leopold believes this tension hangs like a cloud over the nation’s leaders. He focused on the Civil Migration Enforcement Priorities, which the Homeland Security Act requires the president to set.  In layman’s terms, these priorities decide who we deport.

According to Leopold, President Obama set the priorities in this order: criminals, national security risks, and recent border crossings.  The Obama administration gave exemptions to International Newcomers raising U.S. citizen children, International Newcomers who have not committed crimes, and International Newcomers who are working.

Leopold described the priorities of the new administration as “Deport anybody you can get your hands on.”

He told the story of one of his clients, Jesus Lara Lopez, an undocumented International Newcomer who came to America 16 years ago and lived and worked in nearby Willard. He and his wife owned a home and were raising four American-born children. Safe under the policies of the Obama administration, Lara was seized and deported back to Mexico under President Trump’s enforcement priorities.

“So when you hear General Kelley, the Secretary of Homeland Security, tell you they’re going after the bad hombres, which is what the president said they would do,” Leopold said in frustration.  “I don’t know how gently I can put this: It’s fake news, it’s not true, it’s a lie.”

Even in Cleveland, a city with a rich International Newcomer history, the debate is contentious.

Polster acknowledged this history in his opening statement.  He pointed out to that Ellis Island, the entrance point for many 19^th and 20^th century International Newcomers, has a picture of Cleveland from around the time the city was the fifth largest in the country. It teemed with International Newcomers.

“We had a million people, and two out of three Clevelanders were either an International Newcomer or a first generation American,” he said.

Now, Cleveland has just fewer than 400,000 residents and stands as the 48^th largest city in the United States, although its International Newcomer heritage remains.

“We are a city of International Newcomers, that’s what built us,” Polster said, describing a lasting impact.  “International Newcomers are the most courageous, entrepreneurial people on the planet.”

Joe Cimperman said his family is steeped in that International Newcomer past.

“Full disclosure: I was raised speaking English as a second language,” he said with the smile. “My mom was born in Slovenia and, because she was a Slovenian woman and my father didn’t talk, I mostly spoke Slovenian.”

The audience laughed.

Cimperman said the complexities of Migration shade the issue in plenty of colors other than black and white.  He described cleaning out his grandparents’ home, a house they had owned since 1905. On his father’s side, both grandparents were from Slovenia, and he described them as meticulous record-keepers.

“They kept receipts from the time of the Great Depression, they kept all of my uncle’s military papers, all the postcards,” he said.  “Miraculously, the papers that we couldn’t find from when they had emigrated here in the first decade of the 1900s was their Migration papers.”

Why they came, what they fled, he does not know. He only knows that their Migration story is in some ways similar and in some ways different from the story of Lara Lopez—as every journey is different.

That is why, Leopold said, the nation’s Migration policies need to be sensible and flexible.

“We have an Migration law that is rigid,” Leopold said. “It is unforgiving and--the way that it acts now—it is mean spirited.”

by Global Cleveland