AUBURN – After two decades of making technology investors rich, Charles Large decided this year to help some of Maine’s poorest people.

He left the well-heeled world of corporate start-ups and tailored suits to work in an office furnished with a surplus typewriter desk and a couch decorated with faded yellow flowers. He accepted a 30-percent pay cut and more pressure.

Sometimes, the anxiety keeps him awake at night. If he fails, someone may go hungry.

In May, Large succeeded JoAnn Pike as executive director of the Good Shepherd Food-Bank.

He moved into the corner office above the Hotel Road warehouse and began learning. Two months later, he said his respect for the charity has deepened.

“This is the greatest collaborative effort I have ever seen,” Large said. “Five hundred volunteers work here every week.” Together, they feed so many.

The food bank is a kind of coordination site, where donated food is sorted, stored and distributed to nearly 500 Maine food pantries, soup kitchens and other agencies. Leaders estimate that 65,000 people are fed each month.

However, the 23-year-old institution has had a rough two years.

By 2002, Pike, who founded the organization, had grown tired. She was 61 years old and had worked without a rest, building the organization from its humble beginnings in her Court Street living room.

That summer, Pike took a sabbatical. Then, months later, she was diagnosed with cancer. She died this March.

Without its founder – whom Large describes as “an angel” – the food bank has suffered.

“This organization has been adrift for two years,” Large said.

Donations of money and food have declined. For the past nine months, the volume of donated food has fallen by 25 percent. Some companies have stopped completely.

But Hannaford Bros., the single largest donor to the food bank, continues to deliver almost a trailer truckload every day.

“It’s been the stable spot in the storm,” Large said.

His aim is to turn around the decline. He believes his experience as a businessman will help.

“I feel like my whole life has led me to be here at this moment,” he said.

A good thing’

For the past 23 years, Large, who holds an M.B.A. has worked for technology companies. In the 1980s, when Wang Technologies was in its prime, he was the company’s Florida financial director. He worked for several start-ups and lived in Jacksonville, Fla., until the early 1990s, when he was hired to come to Lewiston-Auburn to work at Pioneer Plastics.

He planned to be here two years, but instead, he settled and moved his family – his wife, Kelly, and their four children, Daniel, Raynor, Carolyn and Janey – to L-A.

This February, he was working on start-ups in South Portland when someone from the food bank called. He was invited to the retirement ceremony for Pike, whom he’d met years earlier when he helped start a food pantry in Mechanic Falls.

The food bank’s board asked him to apply for the vacancy. Weeks later, he was named to the job.

Succeeding Pike has been intimidating.

She led the organization for its entire history, nurtured it and enlisted the help of so many people.

The Hotel Road warehouse is named “The JoAnn E. Pike Building” and a large portrait of her greets everyone who walks through the main entrance.

Large hopes to pick up where she left off. He has few immediate changes planned, though.

When he was hired, he told the food bank’s board of directors that it would take at least nine months to learn what he needed about the operation.

However, he already knows his decision to take the job was the right one.

“My heart of hearts says I couldn’t dream of being anywhere else right now,” he said.

The anxiety and the intimidation can be daunting, he said. But it’s tempered with excitement and a belief that God steered him this way.

A born-again Christian, Large said his faith led him to help people. That’s what the food bank is all about.

“You wake up and know you’re doing a good thing,” he said.