Sharing executive skills
Norwalk organization making strides to solving big problem in Africa
NORWALK — It was an impressive figure on Giving Tuesday entering December, with more than a halfbillion dollars raised online for charities in the United States alone.
As for the Norwalk nonprofit with the impressive moniker Give Back Global? Every penny counts these days, as founder Peter Korzenik continues his quest to export U.S. management techniques to African health clinics.
Next summer, Korzenik will cross the point where he will have more time at the helm of Give Back Global than he spent with his previous employer. Founded by David Rockefeller and later coming under the direction of the U.S. Agency for International Aid, IESC functions as an international version of the Service Corps of Retired Executives, whose consultants volunteer to share advice with small business owners and entrepreneurs.
After years of recruiting IESC volunteers and managing a database of some 10,000 people it built through word of mouth, Korzenik decided in 2006 to create a similar organization after IESC moved its offices from Stamford to be near USAID in Washington. Korzenik settled on helping African health clinics improve their operations as a major area of need.
“A … takeaway from my research was that doctors and nurses are the folks who run health care facilities in African hospitals (and) clinics, not professional managers — and they have not been properly trained,” Korzenik said. “Business executives … look at the world differently. We would have clients from overseas who would say, ‘Can you please send an executive and not a consultant — someone who has founded a company or run a company. I want someone who can look at the world through my lens.’ ”
Korzenik developed his own world views growing up in Hartford as the son of a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. His sister became a longtime news anchor in Washington and his brother a financial
industry executive. After graduating from Vassar College in 1983 with a major in the Russian language, Korzenik eventually hooked on with a company attempting to set up trade with businesses in the Soviet Union after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
From there, he found his way to IESC in Stamford, ultimately coordinating volunteer assignments for some 2,000 executives overseas.
Creating a structure for his own vision and finding an executive who would undertake the monthlong volunteer gig was no easy task. It took Korzenik until 2013 to line up the first assign
ment, arranging for an executive to spend a month in Uganda — on his own dime — mentoring a clinic there.
“It took a while to find someone — I must have tried 300 people,” Korzenik said. “The guy who ended up doing the project was perfect. … He went to a rural healthcare clinic outside Kampala.”
From that initial foray, Korzenik developed a pair of partners in Uganda and Kenya and challenged them to think big with nationwide management mentoring programs, leaving it up to them to design the program and on his end promising to arrange a pipeline of U.S. executives.
Volunteers have helped managers in Uganda and Kenya with any number of challenges, from studying ways to institute telemedicine,
to building a stronger workplace culture as a tool for retaining talent and bringing out the best in employees; to fundraising.
It was the Kenya partner who developed the idea for a virtual mentoring program over the Internet, eliminating the problem of having to convince U.S. retirees to go abroad for a month. The Wired4excellence program launched last January, with two dozen people having taken the course this year completing modules and getting ongoing feedback from mentors as they attempt to instill what they are learning at their clinics.
“I believe that if you improve one healthcare manager’s leadership abilities, that’s going to have an impact on financial and operational performance, staff will be more motivated and engaged, and
it will ultimately have an effect on the health outcomes in that community,” Korzenik said. “It’s hard to measure, but if you help one person become a better manager it’s going to ripple out.”
Korzenik has supported Give Back Global largely from his own savings. He has not registered Give Back Global as a charity qualifying donors for tax deductions under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service’s income tax regulations. He said he envisioned Give Back Global all along as more of a nongovernmental organization that would rely on funding from other entities whether from the nonprofit or corporate worlds, in formal affiliation or otherwise.
Today, Korzenik runs Give Back Global from his home office in Norwalk. In the early going of
Wired4excellence he thinks he can sign up mentor relationships at a pace of two a week, and exponentially more in time, particularly as he curries partnerships with U.S. international aid organizations, health industry entities and academic institutions.
It has taken a long time, but he believes he has Give Back Global in position to finally deliver on its promise.
“When I hit upon this idea…I didn’t know anyone in U.S. health care; I knew nothing about Africa, I knew nothing about African health care and I had no contacts in Africa,” he said. “It’s taken a while. … A successful day is if I can move things closer to my goal.”