How the St. Louis Mosaic Project is paving the way to welcome foreign-born to St. Louis.
A new article from the Brookings Institution highlights the work that the St. Louis Mosaic Partnership Steering Committee and Betsy Cohen, its Executive Director, work on to build our foreign born community.
A new foreign resident in St. Louis with a specialty in accounting is connected with peers in the local industry. Immigrant entrepreneurs spanning high-tech industries and neighborhood businesses get resources to launch and scale. Mentoring and support groups help over 300 international spouses feel at home in the region.
These services are all part of the Mosaic Project, a seven year-old initiative of the St. Louis World Trade Center, aimed at ensuring that the region is equipped to fully leverage the potential of foreign talent and immigrants from around the world to fuel local jobs and growth. The effort is a building block of a broader regional strategy led by the World Trade Center (which is housed within the St. Louis Economic Partnership) to ensure St. Louis’s overall global competitiveness.
“You have to create a welcoming tonality of your local community at the same time that you have to be attracting international people,” said Betsy Cohen, the project’s executive director and a former Nestle Purina executive, “The soil has to be receptive to the seed. If you bring the seed and the soil isn’t receptive, it won’t thrive.”
Read the article by Rachel Barker, Marek Gootman and Max Bouchet here.
