ABOUT NATE
I’m just a regular guy, nobody special. I possess no special skills manufacturing baked goods. I never imagined I would have a need to write a bio, but as a result of an overwhelming interest in the concept of Opportunity Farms, here is my heretofore untold story.
The Opportunity Farm is just that, a business that will provide ‘opportunity’ to folks who aspire to begin their lives over again. It was realized out of my own need to spend my working days which, like so many others, consumes most of my time, living by the realization that “there is so much in the world that is broken…pick something up and fix it”.
A challenging childhood led me to ask the meaning of life questions at a very young age that most people never ask in a lifetime. I was just a kid who hadn’t been alive long enough to make any mistakes that he needed to pay for, so why all the heartbreak so soon. As time went on, and realizing things weren’t going to get much better, I was compelled to get answers from a source I could trust before I became a victim to my circumstances…and found God. As a result, my heart led me into business ventures with the objective of trying to help others in need. I call it the “blessing in my affliction”.
I started with a construction company that built and sold ‘Middle America Homes’ on Long Island, New York for less than $100,000 dollars. Then there was an endeavor in Yugoslavia for the purposes of combining the machinery and technology of major U.S. companies with the soon to be defunct factories and labor force of a country still struggling to adjust from communism to socialism. Next, after spending several years in the construction industry in Florida, I settled in North Carolina where I got back into the affordable housing business.
What followed in my life from that point on is what fueled my passion to serve the homeless. After volunteering at the Emergency Winter Shelter in Charlotte, I took a supervisors position at the Uptown Men’s Shelter for a little over a year, then back at the Winter Shelter for another season. It was here that I learned firsthand that there was a large segment of those folks who wanted to be productive, just not back in mainstream society. Seeing how many of them subscribed to the philosophy of “Stop the world, I want to get off!”, I began my quest for creating jobs for as many of my new found friends in the shelter system as I could.
As fate would have it, I was approached by a car dealer acquaintance of mine with the intention of revamping the wash and wax departments of his four dealerships. When he approved my only criterion of hiring the residents of the shelter, New Life Auto Reconditioning LLC was formed shortly thereafter. It was with this experience under my belt that I was able to figure out the best format for a business which employed the homeless. It would need to be one that was centrally located and where permanent housing, food, transitional resources such as job skills training, vocational rehab, continuing education, spiritual support and the like would be available.
Opportunity Farms is the latest evolution of a business model for this purpose. With a mixture of creativity and perseverance, combined with a whole lot of divine intervention, my homeless companions and I just might ‘fix something’ together.
-Nate Cerbelli