Leading Change
"It’s not just citizens in some warm and fuzzy way. A city’s a business, a state’s a business, a country’s a business. So how do we get the next workers trained and engaged in a workforce so that our city, state, and country can survive?" We met with community leader Nickey Nesbeth about her overlapping projects shortly after she appeared on a TBF panel in June on supporting immigrant professionals.
We met with community leader Nickey Nesbeth, who founded the Caribbean Youth Club in 2010 and the Boston Girls Empowerment Network in 2013. In recent years she has headed the Black Refugee and Immigrant Community Coalition and Immigrant Workforce Development Initiative. A powerhouse of execution, a scholar of history, a thoughtful analyzer of trends and data, and a warm heart of her community, Nesbeth was also the spark that fired up the English for a Strong Economy coalition. We spoke to her about her overlapping projects shortly after she appeared on a TBF panel in June, Tienen alas, pero no las pueden usar: Stories of Immigrants in Search of Work Credentials. The following excerpts are from a long and layered conversation. A condensed and edited version of this interview appeared in the Fall 2025 Issue of TBF News.
Interview: Nickey Nesbeth
Leading Change
The Boston Foundation (TBF): You give not just your efforts to your organization, but your knowledge to the world. Thank you for that. You’ve helped the Boston Foundation as we strive to connect the wisdom of people who have the experience and know-how to solve the problems, the people who have some resources and perceive the needs, the people who research and communicate about it, and even the people with the power to implement change.
NN: I think that’s the best of what a foundation can actually do. A lot of times foundations are quite insular, and you have people who may not necessarily always understand what’s happening on the ground. Whereas the best place and the best way to solve is to go to the people who are actually in the community. So, right here we’re in Mattapan Square. This is the heart of the Afro-Caribbean community. This is where the Haitians live, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, all the people coming from the Caribbean. If you look out the window here, you can see that there’s a Jamaican restaurant, and here’s a spiritual healing boutique, a botanica. Everything: hair salons, tons of bakeries, the place to get the best Haitian patties. It’s where people feel at home. It's been a very vibrant neighborhood since the Caribbean community started living here probably over 50 years ago. When you live here, your finger is on the pulse of what's happening and you get to understand things at a very tangible, very granular level and see what the real issues are. So I think it’s great that the Boston Foundation has a goal to work as a connector. Not just to give money, but also to use its considerable influence and platform to bring folks together to solve issues.
NN: It’s working. Two years ago, I brought the workforce development issue to folks at TBF. All the big things that you see happening recently with the workforce effort, the ESOL for work—we’ve been meeting for two years with Andre [Green of SkillWorks]. We created legislation that came out of it. All of that ultimately came from my conversation with them two years ago.
TBF: What spurred you to bring the issue to TBF’s attention?
NN: At my organization we were working with undocumented immigrants, and in 2020 I created a program for undocumented youth called Dreamers Leadership Project. While they were in high school, the Dreamers Leadership Project gave them a stipend and assisted them in trying to figure out what the next steps were in terms of higher education. Do you go into the building trades? Do you go into cosmetology or nursing or whatever it is? But while we were focusing on directing them into higher education, there were also young people who just needed to work. And because they were undocumented, we had no pathways to integrate them into the workforce. We realized we were relegating a whole generation of young people to a kind of purgatory where they couldn’t contribute.
After more than three years of running Dreamers Leadership Project, we had spent roughly $5 million to provide training and so forth for almost 400 young people. I collected the data and brought it to the Boston Foundation to share and say, What do we do now that these young people are ready to get out of school? Together we presented the issue to the broader community, and then we started having a conversation around where we are as a state, knowing that while this is true for our young people, it’s also true for young adults and other immigrants who need to figure out a pathway into gainful employment. So that’s how this whole conversation on workforce development began.
I like that we’re making progress. I’m grateful to the Boston Foundation for having given me the platform to introduce it, taking it up, going the extra mile to bring 40 other organizations from across the state to say, OK, we all see this issue. How can we collectively solve it?
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Resettlement
TBF: Can you describe some of your Black Refugee and Immigrant Community Coalition work?
NN: Part of my work with migrants over the last two years has been operating a shelter at the Seaport last year and then moving to what we call a “scattered site” model. In the Seaport folks were extremely hostile to our presence. We had a big commercial building, a former WeWork site that was empty since the pandemic. It seemed neighbors would rather see it empty and people sleeping on the floor at the airport. We had over 30 families in our shelter, and after four months, we moved them to shared units in and around the community here. Now they’re in the community, but the challenges are pretty much the same. How do you get folks successfully resettled? How do you get them gainfully employed? How do we resettle and cultivate a safe environment for the next generation of workers? Because at the end of the day, that’s really what it is: It’s not just citizens in some warm and fuzzy way. A city’s a business, a state’s a business, a country’s a business. So how do we get the next workers trained and engaged in a workforce so that our city, state, and country can survive?
Our resettlement program was designed to be a year. They started at the Seaport shelter; from there, we have more than a dozen apartments as our scattered site shelter. We put them in shared units, and we pay the full rent for over six months. During that time, we would get them onto the HomeBASE program. Step three would be getting them into permanent housing, with HomeBASE helping them pay their rent, and the family paying 30 percent of their income. Utilities would be split between families sharing the unit.
Getting them into temporary housing is important, because it allows us to help them find employment. Step three can’t happen if they don’t. This takes about a year. It’s not something you knock off in three, four, five months. We’re still fundraising because we still have a few families that we’re trying to bring across the finish line with finding an apartment.
TBF: Is finding the units hard?
NN: Oh, my gosh. For affordable units, it’s insane. Sure, sometimes we get offers: “We have an apartment. It’s $5,000.” They can’t afford it. Even when they get temporary assistance from HomeBASE, the cost of rent in Boston eats up all their HomeBASE assistance in six months to a year. One client that we’re now seeking an apartment for gets $316 a month from HomeBASE.
TBF: That doesn’t go very far here.
"...It’s not just citizens in some warm and fuzzy way. A city’s a business, a state’s a business, a country’s a business. So how do we get the next workers trained and engaged in a workforce so that our city, state, and country can survive?"
TBF: Are new arrivals coming from all kinds of different work backgrounds?
NN: We’re serving well over 100 clients currently. They come from a myriad of backgrounds, but we’ve had a lot of women who, before they immigrated, worked in domestic labor. A lot of the men worked in construction.
Most of this group were born in Haiti. When Brazil was building the World Cup soccer stadium eight years ago, they lured them over with jobs because they needed the labor. Once the stadium was built, they let them go. Not only were they let go, but they started dealing with a lot of hostility. A great many of them left and went to Chile, where they lived and worked. Then, especially after the pandemic, a lot of them were struggling to make ends meet. They started coming up to the southern border and then from Mexico here. Many of them lived in Mexico for a few months—literally homeless just sleeping outside, sleeping under bridges. They formally applied for asylum, so they didn’t just cross the border. There was a whole app and they applied through that. This was before Trump—now the app’s been shut down altogether.
A lot of them ended up here because Good Samaritan churches would get them bus tickets and help them cross the border. They were in Texas for over a month, and then again, Good Samaritan churches helped them: They were given plane or bus tickets to come to places where they can get more assistance than they could in Texas. They started showing up here at South Station or at Logan Airport. From there, they were shuttled to the family welcome centers—the state had about 11 safety net shelters for temporary shelter like the one we operated. That was in March of 2024, but we’re still working through the resettlement process.
Employment is always the goal. Even when we were at the Seaport shelter, we spent every Saturday working really hard with them, helping them find jobs. A young woman who’s worked with me for five years would come in and help get their résumés done and start working with them on interviewing and just applying. Because if English is not your first language, how do you apply for a job? Or know where to start? She’s Haitian and understands not just linguistically what’s happening but also culturally, and knows the entry points and what they need help with, even to book an interview. Sometimes she'll book it and be there to offer translation support. All of that is necessary before we can get to permanent housing.
"...when someone comes here, they come with dreams and aspirations. And if there isn’t some kind of steady movement toward actualizing those aspirations, they’re going to lose it. Then as a society, we lose out."
"Our workforce needs people who are emotionally and spiritually and psychologically healthy. Instead of traumatized people just trying to survive."
Mental Health
TBF: How do you stay positive, or just keep your head above water?
NN: Self-care is very important. Every Friday I take off and have lunch with one of my many mentees. That’s been life-giving. They’re all young women about 25 to 35, doing this work. They need a place to go and a chance to connect. I find out what’s going on with them, give them advice, encourage them—share a meal, share space. Let them vent. They lift me up, and that’s baked into my process. With all we do, while it seems like it’s a Herculean task, it’s our life. This is our community and none of this is new. We’ve just got to figure out how to get it done this time.
Black immigrants have an extra layer of challenge because it’s one thing dealing with xenophobia, but then we’re dealing with Afro-xenophobia. You can find that even across the immigrant service communities. Because mostly, immigrant means Latino when people think of it, and it’s kind of where the resources go. So they’re heavily dependent on agencies like mine and the handful of Afro-Caribbean agencies serving Black immigrants, because it’s where they can come and be treated with a high level of dignity and respect and have their needs heard and responded to in real time.
TBF: At the TBF panel in June someone mentioned “aspirational capital,” that a person only has so much energy to fight their fight. It seems your work can help people expand their aspirational capital or keep it from being frittered away.
NN: Absolutely, because people run out of energy. That resonates quite deeply with us because when someone comes here, they come with dreams and aspirations. And if there isn’t some kind of steady movement toward actualizing those aspirations, they’re going to lose it. Then as a society, we lose out. Say the person wants to be a doctor. If they can’t find a pathway toward that, down the line we all miss the opportunity to have additional people enter the medical field. Folks get a chance to hang on to that aspirational capital in spaces like this—what I’d call a cultural space. Because you feel grounded. You feel heard. And there’s someone who’s literally invested in your settling here.
When they come, we say, OK, step by step, we will make sure that you get the basics and that it’s being done with dignity. And with love. We had photographers take pictures of some of our resettlement and training activities. We also took portraits one day, and these were so important. You have to remember, since they left Brazil or Chile, these families were sleeping outside in public spaces, under bridges in Mexico. Because there were no mechanisms in place for them to live anywhere. When they finally crossed to Texas, they were sleeping outside or in makeshift places. Then they were sleeping on the floor at the airport and in the bus station. Then eventually they were sleeping on cots in a congregate shelter. In the midst of that, there was never a point that they had an opportunity to dress up. Just recover from the indignity, as human beings. So I told them, we’re bringing in a photographer. Feel free to dress up. They were so excited. It’s the first time I had ever seen the women wearing makeup. First time I’d seen they had really done their hair and had on dress clothes. They dressed up their kids. And they were just so happy that day. We printed all the photos and gave them theirs.
TBF: What a nice thing, to be able present yourself the way you want the world to see you.
NN: More than nice, it’s important to restore dignity because it’s hard to get people who are go-to workers, who are going to contribute and make great additions to our society, if they’re really damaged emotionally. Our workforce needs people who are emotionally and spiritually and psychologically healthy. Instead of traumatized people just trying to survive.
