Page 33 - BusinessWest February 17, 2025

“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.
“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.”
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
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 True Leader.
MBK would like to congratulate our client Andrea Bordenca, Managing Partner at Generative Leadership Consulting, CEO of DESCO Service & Founder of Lead Yourself Youth, on her well-deserved recognition for her groundbreaking leadership and coaching.
413-536-8510 | mbkcpa.com
Ice GRATULATIONS 2025 I DIF
CEO OF VENTURE WAY COLLABORATIVE
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