Meet Alma, Who Got a Job Because of Our Winner, JVS Los Angeles
March 4, 2013 by Sally Farhat KassabToday, we met Alma Zavala, who I see as the true face of our JobRaising competition. Alma is a client of JVS Los Angeles, who won $150,000 from the Skoll Foundation in the JobRaising Challenge.
She appeared on HuffPo Live, which you can watch above, to share her story. Alma was an Iraq Navy veteran who returned to the U.S. after her service and got a college degree. But she couldn’t find a job. JVS paid for her phlebotomist certification training, and now she has a full-time job drawing blood. The twist? She drew blood every day in the military – but because she wasn’t certified in the civilian world, she couldn’t work.
“I was on the verge of becoming homeless,” Alma, a U.S. Navy Corpsman, said in her interview.
As part of the HuffPo Live segment, Arianna Huffington thanked Skoll Foundation Founder Jeff Skoll and CEO Sally Osberg and talked about how the idea came about. “Increasingly, people are looking into the mirror and seeing the leader in the mirror and saying, ‘What can I do to be a part of the solution?’” Huffington said.
During the segment, we also met the CEO of JVS LA and the head of the runner-up organization, Andrew Yang of Venture for America. Brittany Boettcher of the Skoll Foundation talked about the growing importance of crowdfunding in the nonprofit world.
Learn more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/huffpost-jobraising-initi_n_2806264.html