ERIC COLLIER

Eric Collier has volunteered at SFS for several years. He initiated the Black Boys Affinity Group and serves as a mentor and coach for black students in grades 5-8 at St. Francis. Eric shared that the grounding he got from his father is foundational to everything he does. He played sports growing up with a fondness for baseball also given to him by his father. He continues to participate in the game as a player and a coach. It trains him to be attentive to nuance and disciplined in what he does. Life imitates baseball as a good friend of mine likes to say. I don’t believe you stop playing because you get old; you get old because you stop playing. And that is true in life as it is in baseball which how come I keep playing.

Eric has always been a coach, even when he was a sales executive at IBM, he saw the role as a developer of people who could do their jobs better than he could do his. His work with clients and SFS students is based in the latest neuroscience and social science research. He’s coached world class scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as emerging leaders in large organizations and start-up execs. He’s been in the business world since 1968 when he took my first job at IBM (that’s 55 years so people won’t have to try to do the math in their heads). He continues to be excited by learning opportunities like working with students at SFS because it will always be true in his words, “that I don’t know what I don’t know. And that means the learning opportunities are endless.”