Patrick Guerra

I was born in southern Italy in a poor area and my family emigrated to Canada for a better life. After college, I got a job in the expanding tech sector at Hewlett Packard, rather than Ford Motor Company – one of the best decisions I ever made.

I spent 16 years at HP and many more in the technology arena. But after the dot-com crash, I shifted to social entrepreneur work, to share what I knew and give back at the same time. In the midst of traveling the world mentoring social enterprises and raising money for projects like eye clinics, I had knee surgery and wasn’t going anywhere. One of my wife’s associates sent me something about the Encore Fellowships, and I applied.

I was matched with the Second Harvest Food Bank in 2013. As a former supply chain expert, I was tasked with helping them transition from distributing mainly canned foods and pasta to fresh food. An incredible amount of produce is grown in California and goes to waste. The food bank wanted to exploit that but didn’t know how.

When a company donated a building, a developer offered to restructure it and we developed the specs. Now, all the produce goes to that center and, on a quick turnaround basis, is shipped out from there. Within a year, we had transformed their distribution system. That kind of work charges me up.

The nonprofit world is a very different culture. For them, it is not a bottom-line profit motivation, because in many cases it is life and death for the people they are serving. There was a natural skepticism about bringing in someone from the outside. What allowed me to be effective was being teamed up with a young person who had worked there a few years. It made all the difference in the world.

My advice for people considering an encore in the nonprofit sector is to prepare financially. Understand that the psychic rewards are great, but the financial ones are not. You don’t want to make this switch and end up being thrown out of your house, so be comfortable with your financial position before making this leap. There are phenomenal organizations in the social sector, and the Encore Fellowships program can help you network into that. Try that for a year, contribute your expertise and see what that leads to.

(After his Encore Fellowship, Patrick Guerra took a post as Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Hult International Business School.)