Fellowship will help recent UM graduate fulfill her American Dream

As a Merage Foundation for the American Dream fellow, Emmanuelle Topiol has moved a step closer to accomplishing her goal of opening a free medical clinic in Miami

With hammer in hand, Emmanuelle Topiol climbed the ladder and started to drive nails into the wooden beam of a house being built in Miami’s Little Haiti.

Emmanuelle Topiol wants to open a free medical clinic in Miami. A Merage Foundation for the American Dream Fellowship will help her accomplish that goal.

Usually, the University of Miami student is more comfortable in a classroom than at a construction site. But on this day, her effort with a hammer and saw–part of a volunteer project for UM’s Habitat for Humanity chapter–helped immigrant families achieve their American dream of home ownership.

Topiol, an immigrant herself who came to the United States from France with her parents when she was 10 years old, has an American dream of her own: to open a free medical clinic in Miami that will serve low-income residents without health care insurance.

Now, as a recipient of a Merage Foundation for the American Dream fellowship, Topiol has moved a step closer to realizing her dream. She will use the fellowship’s two-year, $20,000 stipend to help pay for medical school, which she will start this fall at the University of Florida.

“The weekends I spent helping Haitian families get a roof over their heads allowed me to meet some phenomenal individuals,” says Topiol. “I learned that the one issue that was most troubling to them wasn’t getting a home or finding a job, but dealing with the crisis of a child or someone else in the family who was sick.”

That’s when she realized she wanted to make a difference, coming up with an idea to open a free medical clinic to serve Miami-Dade County’s underserved communities. It was a dream also fueled by other volunteer service.

For up to 18 hours a week over the course of her three-and-a-half-year UM career, Topiol volunteered in the pediatric wards of Jackson Memorial and Miami Children’s hospitals, playing board games with the young patients, organizing arts and crafts playtime sessions, and more importantly, “gaining patients’ trust.”

She says the experience helped her to “understand the issues facing families in America’s inner cities, and the great need to provide a source of care and trust that parents can turn to.”

Topiol’s community-service work is characteristic of the 12 graduating college seniors selected nationwide this year as Merage fellows. The fellowships, created by U.S. immigrants Paul and Lilly Merage as part of their Merage Foundation for the American Dream, recognize and reward academically outstanding immigrant students who are citizens or permanent residents.

Topiol was born in Paris to a mother who had fled Poland in search of a better future and a father, she says, who “worked from job to job throughout France with nothing more than a high school diploma, taking out loans for my first sets of diapers and medications.”

“A mattress on the floor, a reading lamp, a bathroom and a kitchen crowded into one small space. That was my home when I came into the world,” she wrote in her essay to the Merage Foundation.

The family (Topiol also has a younger sister and brother) moved to Orlando, Florida, in 1997 after her father accepted a promising job in the hotel industry. After graduating in the top 10 percent of her high school class, Topiol applied to and was accepted by UM, an institution whose diversity appealed to her. She graduated this past academic year with a degree in political science and minors in biology and chemistry.

“We believe that the new American Dream Fellows include Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer Prize winners. They are gifted individuals,” says Paul Merage. “Emmanuelle is a wonderful example of a Merage fellow. Her American Dream is truly compelling, and…we look forward to helping her achieve it.”

July 21, 2009