JOLYANA JIRJEES
She is the director of operations for the Chaldean Community Center in El Cajon. She was born in Mosul, Iraq. In 2011, six months pregnant with her first child, she and her husband fled Iraq due to the Muslim attacks. The local Christian community in Mosul faced wide-spread abuses, including forced expulsion from their historic homelands. As Jolyana said, “Growing up it was not safe, and we lived in terror.” She began working at the Chaldean Community Council in 2001 at the time when it was only involved in modia broadcasting. She expanded the non-profit organization by providing social services to underprivileged and underreprososed refugee families in El Cajon. During COVID-19, it was the only non-profit in El Cajon that was helping people learn of and sign up for benefits that were available to them, including education, job training, health and wellness, housing assistance, legal assistance and immigrant and refugee support. She established a medical program that finds health insurance coverage for eligible low-income individuala and families and created a Computer Literacy Program to provide training on the use of computers and laptops. She is a graduate of San Diego State University with a bachelor’s in sociology and counseling. At SDSU, she was awarded an Award for Excellence in Community Engagement and is now on course to earning her master’s degree in counseling.
KRISTEL NICHOLS
