Louie Velasquez

I am an Intel retiree as of December 2013 and I did an Encore.org Fellowship in New Mexico at the Asian Family Center. Using my skills, I helped move the staff from paper to paperless documentation by the use of cloud storage. I also coached effective communications, meetings and interpersonal relationships.

Now, having transferred to San Jose, California, I am continuing my Encore.org fellowship at Sacred Heart Community Services. I am helping update Sacred Heart’s database so that it can be used for a state and federal survey administered by Sacred Heart to assess the other non-profit services offered to the community.

I am also currently involved in Santa Clara County nutrition issues and the correlation between poverty, disease, ethnicity, crime, stress, access to healthy foods and many of the other factors involved in non-healthy eating habits.

Realizing that the years I have spent at Intel have given me skills and discipline has only sparked my interest in teaching this back to local nonprofit communities. Meeting the recipients of services at Sacred Heart gives me a strong sense of value to the community in directly helping those that are in need.

At Sacred Heart, we are telling the story of those individuals that have been brought into a desperate situation by just a slight change in their life. Many in the Silicon Valley are homeless and require help in some way fashion or form. (See this CNN documentary). Having started working in the semiconductor industry some 45 years ago, I was totally shocked in having seen this coming back to San Jose.

I feel that my value as an older worker is that we have proven experience in the things asked of us. After all, with all that we have learned over the years from school, work, life, not to mention just to keep up with our children as they grew from child to adult, there is much left within these “databanks” of ours.