The Welcome Committee

A Group Of Women, Fronted By Laurene Powell Jobs At Her Organization Emerson Collective, Is On A Mission To Fix How America Treats Immigrants

- Alexandra Robbins

Emerson Collective may be the most powerful impact organization you’ve never heard of, particularly given that Laurene Powell Jobs, its president and founder, was married to Steve Jobs until his death in 2011. At the time of this writing, Emerson Collective—named after transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson—has granted a profile interview to only one other media outlet this year, and the employees interviewed for this article have never spoken publicly about their work. Since its inception in 2004, Emerson Collective, which has more than 130 employees—mostly based in California, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.—and is focused on immigration, education, climate change, gun-violence prevention, social justice, and cancer research, has operated as anonymously as possible.

But the Trump administration’s escalating siege on immigration rights has increased the urgency to make immigrants’ voices heard—and that’s one of the issues closest to Powell Jobs’s heart. “At this point, our preference for working diligently under the radar is less important than having people understand the human nature of hateful, demonizing rhetoric,” Powell Jobs tells me the day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s travel ban in late June.

Powell Jobs, 54, became interested in helping immigrants long before the current zeitgeist. In the late 1990s, when she tutored Bay Area students in her spare time, she was inspired to cofound College Track, a program that supports and follows underserved students from high school through college. When the program’s first class applied to college, Powell Jobs learned that those who lacked legal immigration status faced severe restrictions, such as an inability to access state or federal education funding.