What ALICE Looks Like When You Have a PhD

Written by: By Anna-Maria Teresa Temu, Family Action Network Member

My husband Mikhail holds a PhD in biophysics. He published his research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation — one of the most competitive journals in medicine. His work focuses on rare hereditary cardiac arrhythmias in infants. He received a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association. He is, by any measure, exactly the kind of scientist America recruits from around the world.

I hold a master’s degree in political science with a specialization in African and Asian Studies from Lomonosov Moscow State University. I completed doctoral-level research in African history. I speak English, French, Russian, and Swahili. I’ve spent my career bridging cultures — working with immigrant and refugee communities, building cross-cultural strategy, and storytelling across languages and continents.

We are also an ALICE family.

ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — is often described as the working poor. But what that definition doesn’t fully capture is this: ALICE families can include people with advanced degrees, specialized skills, and deep professional contributions. People who immigrated legally, followed every rule, and still find themselves unable to save for a home, unable to afford child care, and unable to predict what next year looks like. I attended Groundwork Ohio’s Legislative Day last week because I believe our story belongs in this conversation.

The Geography of Our Family

I am Belarusian-Tanzanian. I spent most of my adult life in Moscow. Mikhail is Russian. We came to Columbus, Ohio in 2020 — during a pandemic, with all the complexity and hope that moment held. We have a young daughter, Ingrid, who is growing up American in ways we are still learning to read.

Our family is, on paper, an immigration success story. In practice, we are navigating a system that wasn’t designed for people like us — highly skilled, legally present, and still economically precarious in ways most people don’t expect from families that look like ours on a résumé.

When Bureaucracy Meets Motherhood

As the spouse of an employee on a visa, my ability to work in the United States is contingent on my own work authorization — a separate, renewable document that does not automatically align with my husband's employment timeline. Right now, I am in one of those gaps. A status adjustment is in progress. And until it resolves, I cannot work. Not can't find work. Cannot legally work, even in volunteer roles that might be considered paid positions.

Child care is not a calculation we can currently make. It is a non-starter. When you are a single-income household navigating active immigration paperwork, child care costs that exceed a monthly mortgage payment don't enter the budget as a line item. They disappear from consideration entirely.

I’m writing this not to complain about America. It is an observation about a system gap that affects thousands of families in Ohio alone — families whose contributions are real, whose aspirations are genuine, and whose circumstances remain invisible in most policy conversations about early childhood. We are not a cautionary tale. We are a data point that the system hasn't yet learned to see.

The Hidden Costs of Arriving

There is a financial penalty for being new. Car insurance for newly arrived residents costs significantly more than it will three or four years later, regardless of driving history. Rental markets price newcomers into areas or arrangements that are often more expensive than what long-term residents pay. Credit histories don’t transfer internationally.

We have wanted to buy a home. In Columbus’s market, we know that school district quality is tied to ZIP code, and ZIP code is tied to home prices. So we continue to rent — in a neighborhood with good schools, at a cost that makes saving for a down payment feel perpetually out of reach. This is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is the compounding math of arriving without legacy wealth, without family nearby to help, and without the financial scaffolding that American-born families often inherit invisibly.

I have thought often about my own childhood in Belarus, where the government provides robust family support during early childhood — including monthly allowances for all families with children under three, regardless of income, and heavily subsidized public kindergartens with nominal fees. I am not suggesting America become Belarus. But I do think it is worth asking: what would it mean for our youngest children if families — all families — had some form of meaningful support in those first years?

When Life Sends Lemons: Dunia Dialogues

There is a thing that happens when you cannot do the work you were trained for. You start doing other work. You build something from what you have.

I founded Dunia Dialogues out of exactly that space. Dunia is the Swahili word for world — and the project reflects the breadth of my own story. Our signature community gathering, “Mamas Who Move the World,” brings together Black women across the African diaspora alongside Brown and Indigenous women to share stories about motherhood, migration, identity, and resilience. These are women who are also, in many cases, navigating ALICE-adjacent realities — educated, skilled, deeply contributing to their communities, and quietly stretched thin.

My next gathering is anchored to Juneteenth & World Refugee Day in June — not because all of our participants are refugees, but because the spirit of that day honors people who have had to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar places. That is a story many of us know intimately, even when the word “refugee” doesn’t technically apply.

What I Brought to Legislative Day

My daughter and I came to Groundwork Ohio’s Legislative Day as people who understand early childhood policy from the inside out — not just professionally, but personally. I know what it means to make child care decisions based on legal status rather than preference. I know what it costs, in concrete dollars and in something harder to quantify, to raise a child in a country where you are still becoming.

Ohio’s youngest children are not a monolith. They are growing up in immigrant households, in multilingual homes, in families where both parents have advanced degrees and still can’t make the math work. Policies that support early childhood need to reach those families too — families that may not fit the expected profile of who “needs help,” but who are navigating the same structural gaps as everyone else.

We are here. We are contributing. We are asking for Ohio to see us.

— Anna-Maria Teresa Temu is the Founder and Executive Director of Dunia Consulting LLC, a Columbus-based cross-cultural strategy consultancy, and the founding Board Chair of SkillHER Workforce Pathways. She serves as Education & Outreach Lead at Us Together and leads Dunia Dialogues, a community storytelling project centering immigrant and refugee women in Central Ohio. She lives in Columbus with her husband, daughter and two rescue dogs.