Trevor Patzer’s Paying It Forward

Thanks to Elton Melo

by ELIZABETH GARONE

When Trevor Patzer was grow­ing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from fam­ily friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admit­ted to New Hampshire’s pres­ti­gious St. Paul’s School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his school­ing there.

Mr. Patzer was accepted and grad­u­ated three years later. He says the expe­ri­ence of some­one offer­ing to pay for his high-school edu­ca­tion had a pro­found effect on him, and the gift was always in the back of his mind, even as he moved to col­lege and into the work world.

After grad­u­at­ing from Brown Uni­ver­sity, Mr. Patzer, now 35, headed off to Ander­sen Con­sult­ing to be a sys­tems inte­gra­tion con­sul­tant . “It was that or invest­ment bank­ing,” he says. But it didn’t take him long to real­ize that there was more to life than “cod­ing some­one else’s com­put­ers,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m a peo­ple per­son.” Still, he kept plug­ging away in con­sult­ing for two more years.

Dur­ing one of his vaca­tions in 1998, he decided to visit Nepal and see “the biggest moun­tain in the world.” While there, Mr. Patzer had another life-changing expe­ri­ence and it had lit­tle to do with the majes­tic awe of Mount Ever­est. His tour guide for the trip was Usha Acharya, an author and the wife of Nepal’s for­mer ambas­sador to the United Nations. While they took in var­i­ous his­toric sites together, she talked to Mr. Patzer about the plight of poor chil­dren in Nepal. He decided on the spot that he wanted to fund the edu­ca­tion of a Nepalese child, in the same spirit Mr. Ohrstrom had funded his edu­ca­tion. When Mr. Patzer asked Ms. Acharya if she knew of such a child, she spoke of a young girl who could ben­e­fit from his philanthropy.

The foun­da­tion for Mr. Patzer and Ms. Acharya’s non­profit, the Lit­tle Sis­ters Fund, which pro­vides long-term schol­ar­ships to girls in South­east Asia, was laid right at that moment. Mr. Patzer took his time before mov­ing into Lit­tle Sis­ters full time. “I didn’t just jump ship” right away, he says. “I’m just a bit more con­ser­v­a­tive in nature.” But, he left Ander­sen two years later and took a posi­tion as a recruiter for teach­ers at pri­vate schools in Boston. Later, he worked as an assis­tant admis­sions direc­tor for a pri­vate high school in Alexan­dria, Va., and finally as a project super­vi­sor for a luxury-resort com­pany that was set­ting up high-end spas in South­east Asia.

All along, he worked on Lit­tle Sis­ters dur­ing the week­ends and evenings. And he says each job he took helped move him for­ward in his quest to make Lit­tle Sis­ters big­ger, because each posi­tion had either an edu­ca­tion or a South­east Asia com­po­nent to it.

In the sum­mer of 2006, Mr. Patzer finally decided to dive into the Lit­tle Sis­ters Fund full time. To keep costs down, he is the only U.S.-based paid employee. Every­one else is vol­un­teer or based in Nepal where salaries are much lower. From pay­ing for the edu­ca­tion of that first girl, whose name was Bind­haya, the orga­ni­za­tion has grown and is cur­rently pro­vid­ing long-term schol­ar­ships to more than 700 girls.

And Mr. Patzer plans to grow it even more in the com­ing years, accord­ing to Quentin Kof­fey, a friend and board mem­ber for the Lit­tle Sis­ters’ Fund. “Trevor is extremely proac­tive and really believes he can make a dif­fer­ence,” says Mr. Kof­fey, adding that Mr. Patzer seems to always have a way to deal with prob­lems that come up. “And, as long as he believes there is a solu­tion, Trevor’s DNA just dri­ves him toward doing some­thing about it.”

This spring, Mr. Patzer is being given an Unsung Hero of Com­pas­sion Award from the Dalai Lama, some­thing he says con­firms for him the impor­tance of the work his orga­ni­za­tion is doing. He says he hasn’t looked back since mov­ing into the posi­tion full time. “I have the best job in the world, and I get to meet the most amaz­ing, com­pelling indi­vid­u­als,” he says.

Know more about Trevor here.