Please join me in welcoming Chris Salm as Growth Project Manager and Spanish Translator to the NGPF team. Here is her essay on what motivated her to join NGPF. 

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After many years living in Spain, I had decided that organizing a Thanksgiving mega-feast could be my way of saying thank you to many friends and colleagues that had helped me establish myself in a foreign country.  If you know much about Spain you will already know that a seemingly easy task in my Wisconsin hometown would not be so easy in Madrid.  I sourced the turkey from a farmer, divided in portions because Spanish ovens are generally not large enough.  I enlisted family members back in the United States with tasks like sending me brown sugar, a casserole dish, and some canned cranberry sauce. I surveyed friends for a location, landing on a house just outside of the capital where there was a dining room large enough to hold 30 people with two ovens in its kitchen.  I took a train up to Paris, France where my aunt and uncle were living to track down a Thanksgiving vegetable essential, and my personal favorite, the rutabaga. 

I mapped out a plan and got cooking, as each dessert took 3x as long in a Spanish oven! It took 3 days, 6 grocery stores, 4 helpers, 15 dishes, and 30 people from all walks of life to make it the best and most memorable Thanksgiving I’ve ever experienced or hosted. It was a ton of work, but I loved it.  The best part? NGPF gets to be my next Thanksgiving mega-feast, metaphorically speaking of course.

During my time as a Spanish educator in NY, I also worked as a freelance translator.  And when NGPF reached out to me about offering their personal finance curriculum in Spanish, I was more than happy to help.  I was lucky enough that my first jobs were in banking and tax preparation, so I understood first-hand the advantage an individual has when they’ve been given the tools of financial education early on in life.  Here at NGPF, my passions for Spanish, personal finance, and project management have all come together!  Joining NGPF as Growth Project Manager gives me the opportunity to help organize the details and, with everyone’s help, make the whole enterprise greater than the sum of its parts.  

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Didn't know that NGPF had Spanish translations? Here are 25 new Spanish translations and our Spanish Translations Directory. 

About the Author

Chris Salm

Chris (ella/she/her) joined NGPF full-time as a project manager and Spanish translator after 13 years as an educator in NY. She is a graduate of St. Louis University in Madrid, Spain with a degree in International Business. She has a Masters in Teaching from Pace University in New York and a certification in translation from NYU. She brings organizational skills to the team at NGPF, helping to ensure every high school student graduates financially literate. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and going back home to Spain with her husband and two children. She also enjoys running with her dog and exploring nature.