CEO, DESCO Service

She Thrives by Bringing People Together to Cultivate Community

Andrea Bordenca
Photo by Bob Zemba, Simple Truth Imaging

Early in life, and then as she started her career, Andrea Bordenca had no real desire to work within, let alone manage, the business started by her father, DESCO, a healthcare emergency field-service response organization.

“I said, ‘it’s your thing, dad, but I don’t know if it’s my thing,’” she recalled, adding that she did work for the company in various capacities in her youth, but began working professionally as a technical writer and later handled marketing for her husband, an artist specializing in murals.

But things changed when her father got sick with kidney cancer.

“I thought it was something I needed to do to help my parents … and I eventually fell in love with it,” said Bordenca, who joined her mother, a nurse practitioner, in managing the venture, taking the role of president. Over the past 20 years, Bordenca, now CEO and chairperson, has expanded its services from laboratories to hospitals, surgery centers, clinics, restaurants, and hotels, taking sales from $4 million to $10 million while greatly improving profitability as well.

But her success in growing the company and taking it the next level is not why she has been named a Difference Maker for 2025, although it’s certainly part of her inspiring story.

Instead, it’s what she’s done at the space that … well, also serves as DESCO’s headquarters, at 200 Venture Way in Hadley.

There, she has created what she calls the Venture Way Collaborative, with the emphasis on the last word in that title. There, she brings together diverse voices and provides both the physical space and positive environment for people to grow and achieve something she never felt growing up — a sense of belonging.

“I thrive when people of all ages, races, and genders are in dialogue together,” said Bordenca, a self-described entrepreneur, executive coach, and youth and adult leadership educator. “And I believe that the only way toward systemic change is by bringing all community stakeholders together to create change together.

“In my leadership and coaching, I work with people to develop a grounded and powerful presence rooted in what drives them,” she went on. “This starts with creating awareness of how people see themselves. That awareness then creates choice to move differently in the world. The root of all these conversations is care. What are we taking care of? What needs more care? A common missing piece in the leaders, parents, and kids I work with is ourselves.”

She does this at Venture Way Collaborative, which she described as far more than space that can be rented for events, team-building exercises, community gatherings, nonprofit fundraisers, and yoga classes — although it is that, too.

“We don’t just rent space; we form relationships,” she told BusinessWest, adding that the collaborative is a “space for community members to work, learn, and explore creative solutions together.”

It is home to DESCO, which now boasts more than 60 employees and serves businesses across the country, but also Generative Leadership Consulting, which she serves as managing partner, as well as Lead Yourself Youth and the Women’s Collaborative, two initiatives she founded to enable those constituencies to address issues and challenges together and collaboratively.

Ira Bryck, the former director of the family business center at UMass Amherst, and a Difference Maker himself in 2020, first met Bordenca as she came to the center to navigate the many complex issues that confront those in family businesses.

In nominating her for this award, he said she helps individuals, and especially young people, become the best versions of themselves.

“When I would try my best, I wasn’t as good as my peers or my sister, so I developed this narrative that I was stupid because I didn’t do well in school, and I would try my hardest.”

“Her leadership methodology combines neurolinguistics, mindfulness, emotional literacy, and somatics, and this comprehensive approach facilitates the embodiment of leadership rather than passive learning,” he wrote. “She focuses on developing awareness and creating choices for people to move differently in the world, with care at the root of all conversations.

“On top of all these ventures and accomplishments, she is a wholesome, kind, generous, curious, inspired person, who loves nothing more than to make the universe a better place to live,” Bryck went on, adding that the sum of her accomplishments and attributes certainly makes her a Difference Maker.

Life Lessons

Before talking about what she’s created with the Venture Way Collaborative, Bordenca first talked about her own life, her own struggles to try to fit in, and her inability to see her own worth, because the two are related.

She grew up in Medfield, an affluent community in Eastern Mass., and struggled, as she put it, to feel like she belonged.

“I wasn’t a great student, and my older sister was,” she recalled. “And even though I looked like everyone else — it was a white-dominant town — I really struggled in school, and I was seen as disruptive.

“When I would try my best, I wasn’t as good as my peers or my sister, so I developed this narrative that I was stupid because I didn’t do well in school, and I would try my hardest. And as a defense mechanism, I ended up skipping school, got into drugs, and was just disruptive to get the acceptance of my peers. I recognize that now as an adult, but didn’t know it at the time.”

Andrea Bordenca says her many programs are designed to give people something she didn’t have growing up — a sense of belonging.
Photo by Bob Zemba, Simple Truth Imaging

A psychological determination would reveal that she had four learning disorders, including ADHD, and this helped her overcome feelings of being “stupid,” as she put it, although she struggled with various medications prescribed for her.

She credits her husband with helping her understand that “there was nothing crazy about me — I just didn’t fit into the box I was supposed to be fitting into in the town that we were in.

“That gave me some hope,” she went on, adding that she eventually took herself off those medications and “found what it was that gave me a sense of belonging.” And, in the simplest of terms, the Venture Way Collaborative was created to help others do the same.

She broke ground for the collaborative in 1999, just a few months before the pandemic arrived. COVID initially kept the facility from doing what it was designed to do — bring people together, in person — but Bordenca carried on through Zoom, and admits that her timing was actually good because she could not have afforded to build the facility amid the soaring construction costs that arrived post-pandemic.

As she mentioned earlier, it is physical space where people can meet, but it’s much more than that.

“It’s a physical space that manifests a place where I want to feel good, and where I want others, when they come in, to say, ‘this is good; I feel welcome.’ There are high ceilings, there’s expansiveness, there are bold colors — there are a lot of touches I curate so people feel like this is home,” she said. “I want it to be expansive and creative.”

That’s especially true of a large, 1,000-square-foot space that is called, among other things, the ‘classroom,’ or the ‘studio,’ depending on who’s using it.

“It has no furniture in it in, so there’s room to move around,” she said. “Everything I do has a component of awareness of the body and the nervous system, so I want to make sure that, when I’m doing leadership training, people can feel their bodies and are aware of their movement because that’s not something we’re taught to be aware of.”

The space now hosts groups ranging from the Queer Valley Library to the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts; from the Zonta Club of Quaboag Valley to Faces of Medicine, which shares the journeys, successes, and struggles of Black female physicians.

Building Emotional Resilience

Beyond her work at DESCO and as a landlord at 200 Venture Way, Bordenca is also a coach, working with both adults and young people. As part of these efforts, she created Lead Yourself Youth and the Women’s Collaborative to bring people together and create dialogue.

The former is not an official nonprofit, but rather an informal entity that provides professional development. Bordenca has worked with groups ranging from Girl Scouts to students and educators at the MacDuffie School in Granby and the Hadley school system, and focuses on normalizing different emotions, ranging from anxiety to frustration, using hands-on activities like juggling and sewing.

“A lot of it is helping people build that emotional resilience through these safe spaces of practice and simulation,” she said, adding that she does the same with women, a discussion that will take her to … golf.

“I talk to women professionals who say, ‘I golf, and I hate golfing,’” she explained, adding that she once put herself in that category. “And I say, ‘why do you golf, then?’ And they say, ‘that’s where the decisions are made.’

“I’ll say, ‘if this isn’t your thing, what is something that you can create that might attract some golfers and maybe non-golfers that are also influencers, decision makers, people that you’re trying to close deals with?’” she went on. “‘Can you create another event, like a hike or even a trip to an amusement park?’”

That’s just one example of how she encourages people to help cultivate communities by being creative and focused on knocking down walls instead of doors.

Overall, Bordenca said her broad focus is on helping individuals of all ages, genders, and life paths find common ground and that sense of belonging that eluded her in her youth.

“If people don’t have the people around them that have the same value system, they’re not going to get very far because they’re just going to have people tell them they’re wrong or ‘that’s the wrong way,’ which was a lot of my childhood,” she explained. “The work that I do with other children and also educators and other organizations is … ‘hey, there’s no right or wrong way; it’s just based on values and your compass.’

“If you work in an organization, if you live in a community, if you’re part of a family whose value systems are different, who are the people that you can find that share your values so you don’t feel crazy, isolated, alone, or so you don’t have to compete or fight so hard? It doesn’t have to be that way.

“As social animals, we need other people,” she continued. “And just because of the way we’re taught and we learn, I think it’s really difficult, especially post-COVID with all the social and emotional issues that children and people are having, especially Gen Z, to know how important it is, and how possible it is, to find the people who are just like you.”

Helping individuals do that — helping people find that sense of belonging — is just one of many reasons why Bordenca is truly a Difference Maker.