Immigrant Women Beyond the Box | Sara Asalya Did Not Wait for a Door to Open — She Built One

Not every weak beginning leads in the wrong direction.

Sometimes success starts far from the destination — in a job that does not reflect your experience, a classroom where you have to rebuild what you already knew, or a country where no one yet knows what you are capable of.

What matters is what comes next.

Sara Asalya’s story is a powerful example.

When the Palestinian newcomer from Gaza arrived in Canada, she brought education and professional experience with her. What she could not bring was complete proof of that academic history.

The university she had attended in Gaza had been repeatedly bombed, and her academic records were lost. When she tried to continue her education in Canada, institutions required official transcripts sent directly from her former university — a routine requirement for most applicants, but an almost impossible one in her case.

Asalya later told an Ontario legislative committee that she was rejected more than once because she could not provide the documents.

So she found herself facing a problem familiar to many newcomers in different forms: she knew what she had achieved, but the new system could not fully see it.

Her first job in Canada was at Tim Hortons.

Asalya does not speak dismissively about that experience. She has said she learned a great deal from it. What troubled her was the possibility that a temporary starting point could become a permanent professional ceiling — while years of previous education and experience slowly became invisible.

Instead of spending all her energy trying to force the system to recognize her past, she began asking a different question:

What could she build in Canada that the system could recognize for itself?

She did not wait for a network — she started building one

Asalya has described her early years in Canada as difficult. She arrived with little professional network and no established support system.

Within months, she began volunteering with organizations serving immigrants and newcomers.

On the surface, volunteering may have looked like a small step. In practice, it gave her access to something she badly needed: people, institutions, local knowledge and a first-hand understanding of how newcomer services actually worked.

She did not wait until she had “connections” to move forward.

She began working, and the work itself became the beginning of her network.

When her old academic path was blocked, she built a new bridge

Asalya returned to school in Canada, but her choices were deliberate.

At what was then Ryerson University, now Toronto Metropolitan University, she studied Community Engagement, Leadership and Development as well as Immigration and Settlement Studies. She later completed a master’s degree in higher education at the University of Toronto.

She was not simply collecting another credential.

She was building a bridge between what she already knew and the environment in which she now wanted to work.

Her Canadian studies gave her more than formal qualifications. They gave her access to institutions, people and a deeper understanding of the systems surrounding immigration, education and settlement.

Then the classroom revealed another problem.

She saw a gap — and tested a solution

As a newcomer student, Asalya expected to find clearer support for immigrant and refugee students trying to navigate Canadian post-secondary education.

She saw a gap.

Instead of assuming that her own experience represented everyone else’s, she began asking questions.

She met newcomers individually and through focus groups to understand what they were struggling with. Among them were women trying to balance education, childcare and financial pressure while also learning how to navigate an unfamiliar system.

What emerged was not simply a personal frustration.

It was a shared problem.

So Asalya started small.

She created a mentorship and support network.

That initiative became the Newcomer Students’ Association in 2016.

It did not begin with a large office, a major budget or a polished national organization. It began with listening, testing whether the problem was real and building a modest response around what people actually needed.

Over time, the initiative expanded, organized conferences, attracted funding and developed beyond a campus-based project into a broader organization supporting immigrant and refugee students.

And something else happened at the same time.

The solution she had created for others began creating professional experience for her.

She did not wait for a leadership job — she created a place to practise leadership

Running an initiative requires more than having a good idea.

There are programs to design, partnerships to build, people to coordinate, funding to pursue, events to organize and problems to solve.

Those responsibilities gave Asalya something that no missing transcript could erase: evidence of what she could actually do.

At the same time, she built professional experience through roles at the University of Toronto and Ryerson in areas including research, operations, project and event management, student engagement and quality assurance.

The pattern became increasingly clear.

She lacked a Canadian professional network, so she built one.

She lacked locally recognized experience, so she created and accumulated it.

Some of her earlier academic record was difficult to document, so she added education and credentials that could be verified in Canada.

She saw a service gap, so she turned it into a project rather than waiting for someone else to solve it.

This is the part that is often missing from success stories.

The journey from an entry-level job to executive leadership was not a leap.

It was a deliberate accumulation of skills, relationships, credibility and responsibility.

The executive title came after she had built the reasons for it

Asalya later joined Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto and eventually became Senior Manager of Programs and Strategic Initiatives, working on areas including skills development, equity, gender-based violence and newcomer inclusion.

By then, she had also spent years leading the Newcomer Students’ Association and building experience across academic, community and non-profit settings.

In March 2022, the board of Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto selected her as executive director following a search process.

By that point, the question was no longer whether she had Canadian experience.

She had built a substantial record of it herself.

That is what answers the obvious question:

How does someone go from a first Canadian job at Tim Hortons to becoming an executive director?

Not through one dramatic break.

Not because someone suddenly noticed her potential.

But by building, step by step, the qualifications and evidence that made the next opportunity possible.

Education.

Volunteering.

Relationships.

A project she created herself.

Leadership experience.

Institutional work.

Then larger responsibilities.

Each step solved part of the problem that existed at the beginning.

The lesson she says she learned too late

Asalya has also spoken about something that slowed her down early on: hesitation about reaching out to people and asking for help.

She has said that shyness delayed some of her initiatives before she learned to connect with others, seek out resources and move beyond her comfort zone.

That may be one of the most useful lessons in her story.

A newcomer who arrives without a professional network does not necessarily have to wait years for one to appear.

A network can begin with one conversation.

One volunteer role.

One professional group.

One mentor.

One small project.

Asalya did not wait until she had a network before launching an initiative.

The initiative itself became one of the ways she built that network.

When the obstacle becomes a map

The value of Sara Asalya’s story is not that every immigrant woman should return to university.

Nor does every woman need to start an organization or aim for executive leadership.

The value lies in the way she read her obstacles.

When her earlier academic record could not fully carry her forward, she built new proof of her abilities.

When she lacked Canadian experience, she found places where she could create it.

When she lacked a network, she began building one through the work itself.

And when she encountered a problem affecting people like her, she did not wait until she held a senior title to test a solution.

She started small.

She listened.

She built.

Then she expanded.

That is what makes Sara Asalya part of Immigrant Women Beyond the Box.

Not because of the title she eventually earned.

But because the things that could have stopped her — missing records, invisible experience and the absence of a network — became a list of what she needed to build next.

And she built them one by one.

When Sara Asalya did not find an open door, she did more than keep knocking. She learned how to build another one — and left it open for others to follow.