We recently connected with Ilze Thielmann and have shared our conversation below.
Ilze, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
Team TLC NYC (“TLC”) is an all-volunteer organization that has been greeting and assisting newly-arrived asylum seekers in New York City for over five years. Formerly a tiny group with about 10 active volunteers, TLC has exploded in the last two-plus years, as it has taken the lead on New York City’s response to the recent influx of migrants from Texas and elsewhere. After greeting just a few asylum seekers per week at Port Authority Bus Terminal during its first three years in operation, TLC has undergone a complete transformation since August of 2022, when the first charter bus filled with asylum seekers was sent to New York by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Over the next several months, TLC met multiple buses per day, sometimes as many as ten in a single morning. The organization had to grow quickly and establish, on the fly, the systems and policies that would govern its work on a whole new scale. With now more than 2,400 names on its active volunteer and donor roster, TLC has been able to successfully assist more than 100,000 asylum seekers as they have arrived and settled into New York City. In March of 2023, TLC opened its Little Shop of Kindness, a free store for asylum seekers where they were able to obtain clothing, shoes, toiletries, strollers, toys, and other supplies free of charge, along with free legal assistance, health insurance, assistance with enrolling their children in school, and a variety of other services and resources. The first Little Shop closed in October 2023, but a new one opened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in early 2024. We serve over 1000 migrants every month in a panoply of ways.
As the child of immigrants — refugees from World War II Latvia — the plight of the migrant has always been near and dear to my heart. When Trump initiated his family separation policy at the southern border during his first term, I felt I had to do something to assist those who have come to this country seeking safety and solace. I became a volunteer with the tiny, newly-formed group Team TLC NYC. For a while, I just packed up care bags and distributed them at bus stations where migrants were traveling on their way to their sponsors. Eventually the founder and head of the organization left during Covid, and her co-director asked me to help run the group. By early 2022, I was solely in charge of the group, but it was still just a tiny volunteer organization doing something nice to help others a few times a week.
In July 2022, through the nationwide network of volunteers and groups doing similar work across the country, I received a confidential tip that the governor of Texas was about to start sending busloads of asylum seekers to New York as a political stunt. I was like a deer in the headlights, as I had no experience organizing an emergency response on that kind of scale. I reached out to the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, and was told there was nothing they could (or would) do to help. So I reached out to my handful of volunteers and to other activists and organizations, and on August 5, 2022, eight women with a couple of wagons full of food, clothing, and supplies greeted the first 54 migrants all by ourselves. Fox News covered the event live, and when city officials saw the report, which sought to embarrass New York as having been ill-prepared for the influx of migrants, they finally paid attention and decided to help. By the time the next bus arrived, there was a large, cordoned-off welcome area at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and our mission changed completely. Suddenly, I was in charge, and everyone looked to me to lead the response! I had to figure out how to feed hundreds of people a day who had been on a bus for 36 hours or more; I had to figure out how to get them to shelters or to their families; I had to figure out how to make sure people were safe; and I had to figure out how to pay for it all. It was a matter of “who will do this, if not me?” I essentially had no choice, because no one else was stepping up to lead.
I am grateful that so many dedicated, passionate volunteers and partner organizations showed up to help, and that even more New Yorkers donated to our cause. Somehow, barely able to keep our heads above water, we managed to help tens of thousands of new arrivals with NO financial assistance from any government entity. I put over $50,000 on my own personal credit cards in just a few months, clueless as to whether I’d ever receive any reimbursement to pay those bills.
When we were kicked out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in early 2023, we carried on our mission through the Little Shop of Kindness. The idea for the shop arose out of a vision that came to me as we were distributing clothing and supplies to migrants in the demeaning setting of the bus station. I dreamed of opening a shop where asylum seekers could be treated with dignity and respect, as valued customers rather than as a problem to be solved. I wanted it to be beautiful, relaxing, and pleasant, serving coffee and snacks in a boutique with fresh flowers and colorful displays. I wanted guests to be able to choose and try on their clothing, to receive access to needed services, resources, and information, and to leave feeling re-energized and filled with new hope.
The Little Shop of Kindness fulfilled that vision and more. We started our own legal team, which has helped thousands of migrants navigate the complex and confusing thicket of immigration law. We have partnered with organizations that have provided free health insurance, health care, education assistance, and countless other services. And we have reached out a helping hand with kindness, respect, and understanding to those who often received very little of those things in their daily lives.
As a second Trump term looms on the horizon, the future remains uncertain, but it will likely be dark and dangerous. We will continue our mission despite the gloom. While we might not be able to stop Trump’s aggressive persecution of migrants, we will be helping many people whom no one else will help. Our motto has always been this: Do not focus on what you can’t do. Focus on what you CAN do, and DO IT.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I never had any background in doing this kind of work prior to 2022. In my former career, I was a corporate litigator at a number of different law firms. When I retired in 2016, I sought volunteer opportunities that would be meaningful to me as I worked on my first novel and tended to some extraordinary needs within my family of origin. As described above, I joined Team TLC NYC shortly after its inception as just another volunteer in a little volunteer group. Somehow I became the Director of the group without ever intending to do so. When the migrant crisis hit New York City, I found myself having to step up and meet a challenge I was ill-prepared to face. Because the people of New York City are so generous, kind, resourceful, and tough, Team TLC NYC was able to rise to the occasion and help thousands upon thousands of newly-arrived immigrants despite the inexperience of its Director. Two years later, we are larger, stronger, and more successful than ever, but we are all just volunteers, including me.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Six months after opening the first Little Shop of Kindness, the ceiling started to leak. That would be the beginning of one of the many challenging periods in Team TLC NYC’s history.
We had opened the shop in an abandoned Christian book store owned by the Greater New York Conference of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which had fallen into disrepair. We were delighted to have the donated space, as run-down as it was, and we worked for weeks to turn the decrepit store into the beautiful boutique of my vision. When the shop opened in March 2023, it was lovely, warm, and welcoming, and looked very much like an elegant boutique.
But the building had fundamental structural problems that started to rear their ugly heads after a few months. Electrical problems, poor heating and cooling, and a ceiling that continually dropped plaster on our heads and leaked when it rained made a challenging mission even harder. As we were not paying any rent, it was hard to get any repairs done, so we made do as best we could. We suffered a large flood in early September, which we cleaned up and recovered from as quickly as possible. We were told that the leak would be fixed. But the next heavy rain brought more flooding, and eventually, during record rainfall on September 29, 2023, the ceiling collapsed, and the rains poured down as heavily inside the shop as outside.
When I returned to the shop a few days later, the place already reeked of mold, and three inches of still water remained on the floor. We had managed to throw tarps over the clothing before the flood arrived, but they were insufficient to save most of our inventory from destruction. A huge pile of sopping-wet plaster and debris lay on the floor, and most of the lights in the shop were burned out.
I sat down and wept.
But then, two of my most dedicated volunteers showed up. They cried a little too, but then I said, ok, we have to get whatever clothing we can salvage out of this shop and onto the backs of people who need it. We started lugging piles and piles of dry clothing into the lobby and packing them into large trash bags. We contacted our partner organizations to see who could distribute the clothes to those in need, and then we hired a moving company to come pick up the salvageable clothing and bring it to a place in Harlem where migrants could receive them at a clothing distribution planned for the next day. Through our partner organization, we clothed 143 people that day.
It was clear that we could not return to the old Little Shop, and that we would have to find space for a new shop. But in the meantime, winter was on its way, and we needed to get coats on backs and boots on feet. So we reached out to our network looking for places that could host pop-up shops while we were without a home of our own. During the next four months, we held “Little Pops of Kindness” all over the city, at least once a week. We continued our legal triage and pro se legal clinics for migrants at partners’ locations, and taught those partners how to hold their own clinics as well. We did “Little Drops of Kindness,” where we dropped of warm clothing to shelters, schools, and other locations, to be distributed by partners to those in need. Despite a lack of funds and a lack of our own space, we managed to put coats on the backs of over 3,000 people in just four months.
By January of 2024, we had located a new space, secured funding, and had started building the new Little Shop of Kindness. All of the work was done by volunteers, including myself, with what materials we could scrape together and create with our own hands. We sold designer clothing that had been donated on Poshmark and The Real Real in order to buy new fixtures and stock for the shop. We rallied our partners to do clothing collections in their spaces and transport the clothes to ours. And on January 25, 2024, we opened a brand-new Little Shop of Kindness, brighter and even more beautiful than the first one!
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We are essentially the only organization that I know of that does what we do the way we do it. Many groups give out clothing and supplies to migrants, but it is done either in one-off events or in settings that do not resemble a shop. Certainly no one is serving guests five days a week, every week, in a lovely setting with dignity and respect. No one else that I am aware of is sitting down with every guest to connect with them and find out what their needs are beyond the clothing and supplies we can hand them in the shop. No one is as selective about the clothing we offer or the way we present it in the Little Shop of Kindness. We are very particular about the aesthetic of the shop, and demand that the place look neat, organized, and beautiful at all times. This focus on making the experience of our guests as pleasant and dignified as possible has garnered us a great deal of positive media coverage, and has grown our reputation tremendously. Because of our relative fame, many assume that we are a huge, well-established, and well-funded charity, but the truth is, we are still just a group of like-minded volunteers doing this all on a shoestring budget because no one else will. We focus on what we can do, and do it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://TeamTLCnyc.org
- Instagram: teamtlcnyc
- Facebook: Team TLC NYC
- Other: Google: The Little Shop of Kindness
