Telling stories is a powerful means to teach, lead, and inspire. The best storytellers often employ their own life experiences. Sara Amiri MBA, PMP, shares her story working at Uber and Volkswagen and she explains how her passion to build unity, increase empathy, and raise awareness led to the Healthcare Heroes Project. Table of Contents 00:53 … Meet Sara 04:13 … The American Moroccan Competencies Network 06:11 … Global Project Manager, Uber 10:50 … Layoff and New Opportunities 13:03 … Volkswagen Agile Transformation 13:56 … Remote Working Practices 17:43 … Healthcare Heroes Project 21:15 … Healthcare Heroes Website 25:08 … Healthcare Hero Stories 26:35 … Healthcare Heroes Project Obstacles 28:22 … Get Involved and Tell Your Story 31:41 … Closing SARA AMIRI: ...And we want to be part of this positive change, hopefully, after COVID where we have these stories, and we want the healthcare workers to be part of the conversation and the solution moving forward.  We need better healthcare everywhere in the world, no exception. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Episode 113 of Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hey, good morning, Bill.  I am very excited about our guest today.  Her name is Sara Amiri, and I discovered a website called Healthcare Heroes Project that she was part of, and so she’s going to tell us a little bit about that today. BILL YATES:  It is such an inspiring story, and she’s doing this while holding down a full-time job with a very big company with a lot of responsibility. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  She’s really busy, so let’s just get right into it and hear her story.  Sara, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for being our guest. Meet Sara SARA AMIRI:  Thank you, I’m so very pleased to be here, thank you very much for the invitation. WENDY GROUNDS:  Sure. So can you tell us about yourself and how you came to be a project manager. SARA AMIRI:  I actually came to be a project manager by pure luck, so I was originally a finance major, I thought my entire career would be investment, maybe corporate finance. That was really where I was headed, and I started working for a startup, and so they needed all sorts of project management. And so one of the managers at that time asked me if I wanted to become a project manager, and to be honest at that time I knew nothing about project management or what is a project manager. So I just kind of learned on the job, and it became really interesting because I realized really how much learning opportunities I had as a project manager.  So I started being really interested to the point where I went back to school, did my MBA in IT Management.  And then I took my PMP, and the rest was history.  So it was really pure luck and out of a need from the company that I was working for at that time, which was Blackstone Capital Management. WENDY GROUNDS:  There’s a project that you and I have both managed that became a project while we were doing it, and I would say that’s moving across the world. So I moved to the U.S. in 2000, and I moved with a one year old and a two year old and my husband, and that in itself was a project.  And I have many lessons learned.  So I want to hear your story, you’re from Morocco.  How did you end up here in the U.S.? SARA AMIRI:  So I moved from Casablanca, Morocco, really I wanted to get an education abroad, and you know at that time you want to just be away from your parents.  You kind of want to fly with your own wings.  So I had a couple of options, either a different city within Morocco, which I applied for. I applied to France, England, U.S.  And believe it or not, the U.S. answered pretty quickly.  It was a 48-hours turnaround of, hey, we’d love to talk to you.  Do you want to come visit the school, the university at that time?  And so maybe I went for the easier option, maybe.