Building a Legacy of Courage and Kindness: Paul Tierney on the $5M Commitment to the TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program

For 27 years as board chair, Paul Tierney guided TechnoServe through its greatest era of growth while helping build our pro bono advisory initiative into a world-class talent engine. Following a historic $5 million gift from the Tierney Family Foundation to support the newly renamed TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program, Paul reflects on three decades of impact and his advice for the next generation of changemakers.

This October, TechnoServe celebrated a defining milestone: a $5 million gift from the Tierney Family Foundation to support the newly renamed TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program. This is the largest gift in TechnoServe’s history and will enable top management consultants and corporate strategists to serve as expert volunteers alongside TechnoServe country teams in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

While the announcement marks an exciting new chapter for the pro bono advisory pipeline, Paul Tierney’s connection to the program runs all the way to its roots. Following the announcement and the 30th anniversary celebration of the TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program, former board chair Paul Tierney sat down to reflect on what this program means to his family, look back on his 30-year relationship with TechnoServe, and share advice for those looking to make a difference in their own communities.

An Initiative Rooted in Service

The TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program began 30 years ago as an idea sparked by service as a core value. In 1996, Paul’s son Matthew and his best friend Eric Sillman were looking for a meaningful way to apply their skills, becoming the program’s first participants when they traveled to Peru to help implement a monitoring and evaluation framework.

During Paul Tierney’s nearly three decades as board chair, he helped scale the TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program from a pilot into a world-class talent engine. To date, more than 1,300 TechnoServe Tierney Fellows have completed over 1,600 strategic advisory projects, contributing donated expert services valued at nearly $2 million in 2025 alone. 

Drawing from his own early background in the Peace Corps, Paul knew that successful development requires humility, cultural immersion, and real local buy-in:

“In the Peace Corps, I learned the importance of getting inside a culture rather than dropping in as an American trying to impose ideas that we thought were right, but where the host country or the host entrepreneur had no buy-in.”

Over the years, what began as a small group of volunteer consultants evolved into a cornerstone of TechnoServe’s global operations.

“We, unlike many other volunteer programs, deliver relevant expertise… young people who are flexible enough to either know or improve the language skills that they have to get inside the culture and to prove their credibility with the local staff of TechnoServe and the local clients. That’s proven to be the case every year that has gone by, and every year it’s just gotten better.”

Protecting a High-Return Model

Over three decades, the pro bono model proved that deploying top strategic talent creates a multiplier effect for both grassroots entrepreneurs and TechnoServe’s internal operations. Recognizing that concept-driven talent initiatives often face funding hurdles compared to traditional field grants, Paul saw the $5 million gift as an essential safeguard for the program’s future.

“In funding a program, it seemed to me this was one of the very high-return programs for the benefits of the clients, and for the eventual benefit of TechnoServe if some of the volunteers came back to become employees, donors, supporters of TechnoServe,” said Paul on why he chose to secure the future of the TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program. “It’s proven year after year by the quality of the volunteers, so I didn’t want to see it endangered, and I thought that this gift was one which would ensure the perpetuation and the growth of the program.”

30 Years of Institutional Evolution

Doing an Impressive Job: Rigor at Every Level

During his nearly three decades as board chair, Paul watched TechnoServe transform from a modest organization with a single office into a sophisticated, multinational organization. Paul recalled an early field visit to a TechnoServe project in Mozambique, where he met women working in a cashew processing facility. 

“What we were doing as an organization there was helping people to fit into a worldwide economic system of processing cashews and increasing the value of the export,” said Paul. The project taught “the women in Mozambique to actually do the process and run the machines and then also do them in a way that didn’t disable the women that were working on them because the cashew produces a toxic kind of oil. So they all wore gloves, and they all had certain protections from that.”

In addition to microeconomic work, TechnoServe also supported export and tax compliance in Mozambique. “I thought at each level of the project, we were doing an impressive job and bringing additional income.”

The Next 30 Years: Patience, Courage, and Kindness

Looking ahead to the next three decades, Paul stresses that meaningful economic change is a long-term discipline, and change takes time. His hope is that TechnoServe’s proven methodology continues to serve as an industry benchmark for sustainable poverty reduction.

When asked what advice he would share with the next generation of changemakers looking to create an impact in their own communities and around the world, Paul returned to the core values that have defined Tierney Fellows since day one, and recommends that people consider a meaningful volunteer experience like joining the TechnoServe Tierney Fellows Program.

“Two of the human virtues that I think are the most important for life are courage and kindness.” Paul said the Tierney Fellows “have the privilege of knowing the world from a different perspective.”