Global Tastes is a celebration of Philadelphia’s diverse communities through food! Started in 2007, Global Tastes is Nationalities Service Center’s most important fundraiser of the year and is the only fundraising event and food competition in Philadelphia featuring global cuisine. Every year, this gala event raises vital funds that allow immigrants and refugees in the Philadelphia area to continue to benefit from the NSC’s high quality legal, social, education, health and language access services.
This year, NSC will honor Sozi Pedro Tulante, City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia, with the 2018 Nationalities Service Award. This award is presented each year to an immigrant or a child of immigrants who demonstrates the extraordinary value that new Americans bring to our country, state, and city. NSC sponsored Sozi and his family and helped them come to Philadelphia as refugees from Zaire in the early 1980s. Sozi went to public schools in Philadelphia and then attended Harvard and Harvard Law School before becoming Philadelphia’s chief legal officer.
Stacy Wyn Sarno is the 2018 Margaret Harris Award honoree. As the leader of the community engagement program at WebLinc, an ecommerce software company, Stacy has rallied her colleagues in support of NSC. They have set up apartments for arriving refugees, participated in garden work days, and have both sponsored and volunteered their time for NSC’s annual Thanksgiving dinner. Not only has she launched WebLinc’s refugee-hiring initiative, hiring three of NSC’s clients to date, she is also working and speaking within the Philadelphia technology and business communities to encourage other companies to make job opportunities available to appropriately skilled refugees.