Giving Mom credit for her street cart street smarts
For Aster Teclay, the early job that most shaped the arc of her career is not one she was paid to do. And you won’t find it on her LinkedIn profile.
The job description involves navigating the social, financial and bureaucratic demands of American society as a child of immigrants.
Ms. Teclay’s family came to the United States in the 1970s, fleeing from Eritrea, which at that time was engulfed in a war with neighboring Ethiopia.
The family settled in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., first living with relatives and later opening their own home to other immigrants who needed to get on their feet.
“It was interesting because my mom, dad, oldest brother and sister had a whole life before we came to
America,” she said.
But here, Ms. Teclay could tap into their life experience only so much. Many things she had to figure out on her own.
They gave her a direction. She picked the route.
“Trying to explain to my parents about SATs, extracurriculars,” she said, “They just knew, ‘Go to college, do better.’”
Now a senior project manager with the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, Ms. Teclay shuffles a densely packed schedule of work, yet more work, and a second master’s degree program.
“I’ve always been hustling,” she said.
She and her siblings were the first in their family to go to college. Ms. Teclay’s mother said the things many immigrant parents tell their kids — that they want better for them than what they had. “You don’t want to end up like this,” her mother would say.
But as Ms. Teclay accumulated her business vocabulary at Point Park University during her MBA program, she began to appreciate her mother’s smarts in a new way.
For many years, until her retirement in 2016, Ms. Teclay’s mother operated a street cart in Washington, D.C., selling hot dogs, sandwiches and snacks. In the summer, her kids would come along and watch as their mother juggled orders and anticipated her customers’ wants.
“I look back and think how she would bundle her products, how she was forecasting,” Ms. Teclay said. “She had a lot of business acumen.”
Her mother served as an inspiration for Ms. Teclay’s role in Invest In Her, a pitch competition that she co-founded with a group of other women to serve women entrepreneurs. It is now in its third year.
Despite the warnings encouraging her children to avoid her fate, Ms. Teclay said her mother was proud of her work and the control she maintained over her schedule and her earnings.
And Ms. Teclay appreciated the opportunities she was given as a child, as her parents worked in jobs they didn’t want for their children. Crucially, they lived in a good school district.
Today, she draws on that perspective for her work at the housing authority, where Ms. Teclay is tasked with designing programs to ensure that children of the agency’s clients do better than their parents.
She’s specifically looking at what would enhance the economic mobility of the second generation.
“I’m very aware that I was lucky to live in the community where I lived,” she said.