ONE DAUGHTER’S ROAD:
FROM IMMIGRANT RADISH FIELDS TO THE CORPORATE BOARD ROOM
For Angela Carmazzi, Founder and President of Carmazzi Global Solutions, compassion for the non-English speaker has translated into marketplace impact.
The man was just 19 years old. Recently married in Mexico and desperate for money to feed his impoverished family, he’d come into California illegally. There, at a job site, he’d fallen from a three story building and been paralyzed.
An interpreter was contracted to help with the man’s long, difficult physical therapy. And when Angela Carmazzi arrived, she was confronted by a version of her very own family portrait. “My dad had come from Mexico when he was 15,” Angela says. “He hadn’t come illegally, but otherwise it was the same story. Your family is counting on you, and so you come – because it’s either that, or you die in your village.”
Her father’s sacrifice and work ethic had made a profound impact on Angela. As soon as she was old enough for her tiny hands to pull a radish out of the ground, she had joined him in the fields of central California and worked alongside him all the way through her adolescence. From those fields she’d pulled roots of deep compassion and deep determination – and both suddenly came into play in this watershed moment with a paralyzed illegal immigrant.
Though the interpreting assignment ended, Angela continued to work with the man on her own unpaid time. She helped him through a lengthy physical rehabilitation. She taught him to use the bus to get around. She assisted him at his home.
“Something was happening in my heart,” Angela says. “I was struck with this deep empathy for the people from my culture – the limited English speakers – and it just made me want to do something to help them.”
At the time, Angela was completing a practical, intense, 5-year training program on business networking. From her own tiny dining-room table, she began to put those lessons to work, networking with other linguists and finding assignments for them. From the beginning she committed to deeply valuing the interpreters, appreciating their challenges, and paying them a commiserate wage.
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Just a decade later, that network stretches to more than 5,000 linguists in more than 150 languages around the globe. Carmazzi Global Solutions has become one of the most respected language services companies on the West Coast and in the nation, with a headquarters in Sacramento, CA, and additional offices in Mexico, Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Colombia. Over the last five years, CGS has enjoyed consistent growth in gross revenue, with no signs of slowing down.
What’s more, the company is built on a practical vision of public service and philanthropy: “… caring for clients, partners and staff on such an extraordinary level that the resulting profitability creates avenues to bring aid to social commitments.”
And those words aren’t empty. Carmazzi has actively assisted community decision-makers in resourcefully supporting orphanages in the Philippines and the Boroda region of India. In Kenya, Carmazzi has worked with community decision-makers in efforts to provide clean water, agricultural development, cargo transportation, and dairy farming.
Carmazzi provides all manner of on-site interpretation, telephonic interpretation, and document translation and localization services to a wide variety of government agencies and private-sector enterprises. And the company provides those services in a wide diversity of settings – from corporate conferences, to legal and social-service engagements, to critical medical situations like the one that spurred Angela’s heart years ago.
“There are so many stories out there of limited-proficiency English speakers struggling,” Angela says. “We’re looking to build a company that can not only help them, but one that can make a difference with generous philanthropy as well.”