Our mission is to build communities, enable global employee mobility, and redefine what it means to be international. We envision a world without borders and a new definition of an international resident of a place. We build communities of empowered people working together to create opportunities for everyone. In 2016, our focus is on helping the international spouses of working residents in the Netherlands to integrate professionally. We focus on the professional sphere, because although many initiatives and organizations have responded to the influx of internationals in the Netherlands, they mainly focus on helping internationals to integrate culturally. ESI fills this professional gap. We understand the struggles of the international spouse personally, and are working to create solutions that have a real impact on their quality of life. How do we accomplish This? Well, on the one hand, we work with the community of spouses. We support the spouses to find a job and get adjusted to the Dutch labor market in what we call our “Professional Empowerment Program”. On the other hand, we work with local Dutch people, companies, organizations, and government, to do some collective “place-making” together: Making our cities the international hubs we all envision them to be. Our current community is located in Eindhoven, but we are planning to expand to other locations in the Netherlands. International worker mobility is on the rise not just in the Eindhoven region, but everywhere in the world. Our long-term goal is to be able to eliminate the “problem” of the expat spouse, and prevent it from happening in the first place. We want to make professional integration easy, and we want to involve all of the residents of the region in making it happen. How It All Started? It all started when two expat spouses named Kavitha and Anne decided that complaining about the frustration they felt in trying to integrate professionally was not enough: They had to do something about it. Expat Spouses Initiative was born. In just over a year, we built the largest international professional network in the Eindhoven region. Today, we have over 700 internationals in our community, and we’re growing daily. So far, we’ve hosted over 150 events, workshops, and other activities, placed over 40 people in jobs, and helped over 300 people to become professionally engaged.
