Counselor helps clients find the work they love
By Cindy Mindell

STAMFORD - “Hewers of wood, drawers of water” was how Hendrik Verwoerd described the proper roles of blacks in apartheid-era South Africa. The inferior black education system provided suitable preparation for miners and domestics, the then-prime minister reasoned - the only jobs open to blacks. Comparatively, his government allocated four to seven times more funding to white schools. 
Donna Sweidan grew up white and Jewish in Johannesburg during apartheid, “which had a huge impact on me,” says the Stamford resident. “I realized how education affects one’s life.” While a psychology student at Wits University in the late '80s, Sweidan worked to end apartheid as a member of the South African Union of Jewish Students, and helped incoming freshmen adjust to college life. One day, she says, “something clicked for me and I knew I wanted to be a career counselor.”
Post-apartheid education wasn't much better for black students. Schools, already weak, simply disintegrated, Sweidan says, and kids had no professional role models. Sweidan volunteered as a guidance counselor at a Saturday school - one of many private schools created to bolster the inferior black institutions.
After graduating, she taught biology in a black high school, and set up the institution's first career-services office. Before leaving South Africa for the U.S. in 1998, she taught adult literacy to black factory workers, and business communication to those moving into management positions. By then, she says, “the Jewish community had become like a Swiss cheese,” depleted by a 25-year-long emigration. And the country had become less safe.
After earning a masters in counseling from NYU, Sweidan worked in career services at several New York-area colleges. She helped create a career center at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and was founding director at The New School's career center. She trained at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in Manhattan, then moved to Stamford with her husband, where she worked as a disability counselor at UConn Stamford. Careerfolk, LLC was born early last year.
Sweidan and her husband are members of Temple Beth El in Stamford, where she has led career workshops at the Synaplex program.
Her Careerfolk clients are recent college graduates, adult job-seekers and career-changing Baby-boomers, even a 71-year-old woman -- a “general comment on career changes today,” Sweidan says. “So many people are not fulfilled in their work.”
Clients come to Careerfolk seeking something more meaningful or challenging.
“With the economy so much tighter, one must be extremely strategic,” Sweidan says. The traditional job search involved networking, newspapers, and résumé distribution. But add the Internet, “and now you must do everything two times over,” she says, “both offline and online - far more challenging than most people realize.”
First, she helps clients establish a foundation: “knowing yourself and what you want to do, preparing the right résumé,” and then helps them learn 21st-century job-search strategies. 
The psychological aspect of job-hunting can be paralyzing, Sweidan says, and that's where she combines her psychology training and career counseling into a sort of “career therapy.” 
Sweidan teaches people how to find work they love, “the highest form of tzedakah,” says Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El. 
To reach Donna Sweidan, call (203) 613-1049.