KEITH FITZGERALD MPA 1999 was finishing a one-year teaching job in Singapore, which he took after he earned his Kennedy School degree. He could have returned back home to the Boston area and worked at the Harvard Negotiation Project, as he had done before. The choice seemed obvious.

That’s why he didn’t do it.

Instead, with colleagues from the National University of Singapore, he founded Sea-Change Partners, a private company that offers negotiation training for private sector clients as well as governments and nonprofits. The company fulfills his desire to manage conflicts and support peace processes in Asian countries while providing the financial resources to fund the efforts. And it also fulfills his desire to take a different path.

“I had to ask myself if I would have always wondered whether I should have taken the harder road — starting my own company halfway around the world and taking all the risks that entails,” Fitzgerald says. “On a personal level, I had hit a point in my life where I might have felt too comfortable. And there’s nothing better to fight off complacency and push yourself than to take on a new challenge that scares the hell out of you.”

The company operates on a more effective model than nonprofit NGOs that do similar work, according to Fitzgerald. Those organizations too often try to attract donor funding by “pushing their services on people who may or may not want their help,” he says. In addition, he contends that the nonprofit sector often lacks rigid quality control and fails to train local people to help themselves.

In contrast, he describes going to Sri Lanka to train private sector employees in negotiation skills. While there, he offers his services to peace negotiators or organizations helping refugees from the country’s civil war. For public interest initiatives, he works pro bono or helps secure the necessary funding.

“They realize that I am not there to sell my services to them, and I don’t have the existential pressure to push projects for donor funding, and they can sense that,” Fitzgerald says. “It removes much of the baggage that is so often in the way in such relationships. And the fact that I am there training executives in Sri Lanka’s biggest companies also inspires confidence. They know we must be adding value, or we wouldn’t be hired again and again to do that work.”

Sri Lanka is now developing its own group of professional negotiators, which may supplant the need for Sea-Change’s services. In fact, that’s exactly what Fitzgerald hopes for. His private sector clients may not know it, but their business is funding a new way to serve the public.

“The key is maintaining that balance between revenue-generating work and pro bono work. I consider it a 21st-century Robin Hood model,” he says. “I’ve always believed that with marketable, value-adding skills, a bit of creativity, and a lot of hard work, it is possible both to do good and to do well. I’m simply in the process of trying to prove it.”

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