Thomas Vozzo '22 C-Suite Advisor Since 2022
Chief Executive Officer | Homeboy Industries
Biography:
Thomas Vozzo left a lucrative career in corporate America convinced there had to be a better way to define success. In 2012, Vozzo became the first-ever CEO of Homeboy Industries, the largest and most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world.
Each year, thousands of former gang members from across Los Angeles enter the doors of Homeboy Industries seeking hope and the tools to make positive change. They are welcomed into a community of kinship, love, and exquisite mutuality, alongside access to the needed support services to ensure their own success—including case management, tattoo removal, anger management training, mental health services, parenting classes and more. The overarching goal is to support individuals as they work to heal from their complex trauma and help them see hope in their futures and the importance of their contributions to their families and communities.
Vozzo led the nonprofit organization forward, bringing his business expertise and vision to implement a strategic and mission-driven plan that doubled the organization’s size and impact. He has cultivated Homeboy’s portfolio of social enterprise job-training businesses (including Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Café and Homebody Electronic Recycling), and increased revenues from Homeboy Industries’ social enterprises while only having less than 5% of the organization’s funds come from government sources.
Vozzo’s journey goes from billion-dollar revenues—his last corporate role was as CEO of the $1.8 billion ARAMARK Uniform and Career Apparel Group—to a volunteer unpaid CEO of a nonprofit built on compassion, kinship, empathy, and social justice. Along the way, he has learned hard-earned insights from motivational and sometimes heartbreaking stories of former gang members determined to break the cycles of incarceration and violence of their own lives.
In Vozzo’s first book, The Homeboy Way: A Radical Approach to Business and Life, he gives readers practical ways to address some of our most vexing social issues and provides a new path for personal and business leadership.
