About the project

Gina Cozzarelli had a good life in Ecuador where she and her husband, Wilson, were both practicing dentists. With their daughter, Paola, they had a comfortable life that seemed full of possibilities. But only ten years into their marriage, tragedy struck. After a long and expensive battle with brain cancer, Wilson passed away, and Gina was left to make some hard decisions.

“It was my sister who said I shouldn’t stay in Ecuador,” Gina recalls. “She knew that staying there was going to be too hard for me, and she invited me to join her in Indiana. Knowing it would be a good opportunity for my daughter, I said yes.”

When she first arrived, Gina had hopes of starting up a new practice in pediatric dentistry, like the one she’d run for fifteen years in Ecuador. Unfortunately, after speaking to a number of U.S.-based dentists, it became clear that to do so she’d have to start all over again from zero.

Since going back to school wasn’t an option, Gina decided to change careers; but that plan was also daunting. “You can’t believe how anxious I was,” she says. “I didn’t have any recommendations or referrals because I’d never worked here. I was unfamiliar with everything, and I needed to be able to support my daughter by myself.” Happily, Gina’s sister introduced her to Tom Morales, who was at that time just launching his new business.

“When I started at Morales Group, there were only three desks,” Gina says of the early days at the company. “We didn’t have titles; we just did whatever needed to be done. It’s grown a lot since then, and now I’m in customer service managing a roster of fifteen client accounts.”

Gina has been with Morales Group since the beginning, and she has enjoyed every single day she has spent there, recruiting and interviewing candidates and helping people like her—people who might be starting from zero—to find that all-important first job. “You can never understand how God does things. I’m not a dentist right now, but I feel so good. I feel like this is where I need to be.”