Meet Paula, a CONNECT Client

Like many people in the immigrant communities served by TND, Paula Muñoz had to make career sacrifices when she moved to the U.S. from Colombia 23 years ago. Her part-time job on the housekeeping staff of Boston Convention Center, though reasonably lucrative on the hourly scale, was less challenging and rewarding than the one she had in customer service for Avianca airlines in Medellín. Her schedule was unpredictable and the salary not enough to cover monthly expenses. By the time she sought help from the financial coaches in TND’s CONNECT office, she was nearly $20,000 in debt.

That was less than a year ago, in July of 2022. After three online coaching sessions on budgeting with Edily Vásquez, Paula was able to pay $2000 of that debt. In December 2022, she started taking classes for English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Revere Community School. With new momentum and confidence in herself, she applied for a job as an outreach worker in the Chelsea Housing Authority’s Prattville Apartments complex, where she lives. In February 2023, she was offered the job.

In her new job—a part-time position that she still supplements with the occasional housekeeping work—Paula serves as point person for 72 Prattville Apartments residents who had to move there last year for the duration of a three-year renovation project at their CHA complex on Central Avenue in Chelsea.

“If someone has a problem with the plumbing or the lights, they call me,” says Paula in her office, from her chair at a desktop computer. “It’s a little like my job helping people make flight reservations in Colombia. I like to listen to people and help them”—a quality she seems to share with Edily and her colleagues on the CONNECT staff.

These recent developments, together with her 20-year-old son’s promising performance as an engineering student at Wentworth Institute, “have given me a better attitude,” she says. “My life has changed for the better.”