Kim Guadagno Leads Mercy Center as President and CEO

Kim Guadagno spent eight years as New Jersey’s first Lieutenant Governor, ran for governor in 2017, and spent three decades in courtrooms from Brooklyn to Trenton.

Now she runs a tuition-free middle school for girls.

That shift wasn’t a retreat. It was a choice, driven by a belief she traces back to her upbringing: if you have the ability to help someone, you have the responsibility to do so.

Guadagno is currently president and CEO of Mercy Center, a Central Jersey nonprofit that operates a food pantry, a social services agency, and the private tuition-free middle school for girls. The organization targets what its leadership describes as generational poverty, working with families who don’t have much margin for error in their budgets or their lives.

Before Mercy Center, she led a different nonprofit through the COVID-19 pandemic, one that served 200,000 people during the crisis. That organization’s scale during an emergency says something about the operational muscle she brought to the work.

Her career before 2019 reads like three or four different resumes stapled together. She clerked in the Southern District of New York, worked in private practice in Manhattan, and then became a federal prosecutor with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force in Brooklyn. She later prosecuted federal corruption cases in New Jersey. She taught at Rutgers Law School for six years. In 2007, she became the first woman sheriff in Monmouth County history, a job that put her in a different kind of public service than anything she’d done before.

Governor Chris Christie tapped her as his running mate, and she was sworn in as lieutenant governor in January 2010. The role was brand new. She was the first person to hold it in state history.

During those eight years, as ROI-NJ reported, she helped cut unemployment by 50% as New Jersey climbed out of the recession. She built an International Business and Protocol office that pushed over a million dollars in grants to New Jersey companies trying to expand overseas. She founded Choose New Jersey, a public-private partnership focused on job retention, and the Business Action Center, a state agency that still operates today.

She also served simultaneously as New Jersey’s 33rd Secretary of State.

In 2017, she won the Republican gubernatorial nomination but lost the general election to Phil Murphy. She’s now a partner at Connell Foley, handling commercial litigation, white-collar criminal defense, corporate compliance, and internal investigations.

The nonprofit chapter didn’t come out of nowhere. “She was raised to believe that if you have the ability to help someone, you also have the responsibility to do so,” said a profile from the women’s leadership recognition series honoring her work.

That framing cuts through a lot of the resume noise. The sheriff’s badge, the corruption prosecutions, the lieutenant governor’s office, and the middle school in Central Jersey all connect back to the same thread. Community. Accountability. Show up and do the work.

Guadagno is married to retired Judge Michael Guadagno. They have three sons: Kevin, a Major in the U.S. Air Force and F-35 fighter pilot; Michael, a Dartmouth graduate working in finance; and Anderson, who works as an automobile mechanic.

Mercy Center’s model, tuition-free and focused on girls in a region where economic pressure on families doesn’t let up, fits the moment in Central Jersey. The area has seen significant immigration, wage stagnation in working-class households, and schools stretched thin across multiple districts. A private school that charges nothing and admits girls who might otherwise get overlooked isn’t a boutique charity project. It’s a direct intervention.

Guadagno has been doing those since before the term was fashionable. Her record across law, government, and now direct service work suggests she’s not particularly interested in recognition for its own sake. The New Jersey State Bar Association lists her among active members in good standing, and she continues to practice while leading Mercy Center full time.

That’s a real schedule. Not a ceremonial title.