Julie Schwietert Collazo
About Julie Schwietert Collazo
Speech topics
Tapping into Your Personal Power: How “Ordinary” People Can Ignite and Nurture Extraordinary Change
As photos and videos of asylum-seeking children separated from their families began to be dispersed by mainstream media in the summer of 2018, former social worker Julie Schwietert Collazo asked herself, “What can I do?”. After hearing the attorney for one migrant mother explain on the radio that the mother could be reunited with her children if she could pay her immigration bond, Julie and her husband, an Afro-Cuban refugee, launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised the bond money – and more – in less than 12 hours and more than $1 million in six months.
What started as an effort to reunite one mother with her three children became a movement that, five years later, has resulted in more than $3 million raised, 130 parents and guardians reunited with their children, and hundreds of asylum seekers supported through border and detention intervention programs – all achieved by mobilizing "ordinary" people and resources to ignite and nurture extraordinary change.
In this talk, Julie will share the story of Immigrant Families Together and how its journey and the lessons she’s learned can be appropriated and replicated to achieve profound, meaningful change in a variety of contexts. By claiming our personal power and exercising our resources – however limited we may think these are – we can mobilize our communities to solve problems and create environments for collective flourishing.
Speaking videos
Books by Julie Schwietert Collazo
“The Book of Rosy: A Mother's Story of Separation at the Border” (2021)
Compelling and urgently important, The Book of Rosy is the unforgettable story of one brave mother and her fight to save her family. When Rosayra “Rosy” Pablo Cruz made the agonizing decision to seek asylum in the United States with two of her children, she knew the journey would be arduous, dangerous, and quite possibly deadly. But she had no choice: violence—from gangs, from crime, from spiraling chaos—was making daily life hell. Rosy knew her family’s one chance at survival was to flee Guatemala and go north. After a brutal journey that left them dehydrated, exhausted, and nearly starved, Rosy and her two little boys arrived at the Arizona border. Almost immediately they were seized and forcibly separated by government officials under the Department of Homeland Security’s new “zero tolerance” policy. To her horror Rosy discovered that her flight to safety had only just begun. In The Book of Rosy, with an unprecedented level of sharp detail and soulful intimacy, Rosy tells her story, aided by Julie Schwietert Collazo, founder of Immigrant Families Together, the grassroots organization that reunites mothers and children. She reveals the cruelty of the detention facilities, the excruciating pain of feeling her children ripped from her arms, the abiding faith that staved off despair—and the enduring friendship with Julie, which helped her navigate the darkness and the bottomless Orwellian bureaucracy. A gripping account of the human cost of inhumane policies, The Book of Rosy is also a paean to the unbreakable will of people united by true love, a sense of justice, and hope for a better future.
At a glanceJulie Schwietert Collazo
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