Life’s Work Center people and their stories

Tom Finnegan, executive director, and the Life’s Work Center

Tom is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Life’s Work Center. His professional life leading up to LWC was spent principally as a teacher of adults, entrepreneur, writer, and editor.

He created, directed, and taught in adult EFL (English as a foreign language) programs for the United Nations, businesses, and educational organizations in Greece and Austria during eight years of residence there and in Italy. On returning to the United States in 1984, he began a new career as a freelance writer working mainly for corporate and government clients.

A midlife crisis in the early 1990s led to the life-changing opportunity to train with Richard Bolles, the author of What Color Is Your Parachute? It was in that training, on August 1, 1993, that the “life’s work vision” came to him: to help people unfulfilled by their work find more than just a job.

Starting over in 1994—he and his life’s partner Christine were determined this time to define, from the ground up, the life and work they wanted for themselves—resulted in moving to San Francisco, where he defined and built a livelihood as a freelance editor working with book publishers.

There were more than a dozen pilot experiments, from 1993 on, devising portions of what is now the LW counseling program. The nonprofit LWC was founded in April 2000; the first general-public counseling group convened in October of that year. The LWC’s appealing and inviting office and counseling space at 109 Bartlett Street in San Francisco opened in January 2002.

press release and photos available