PETER THUM

Speaker, lecturer and humanitarian

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 7:00 PM
Horace Mann Auditorium

In 2001, while in South Africa, Peter Thum observed the effect of that county's water crisis on everyday people. Thum saw that those lacking access to clean water were exposed to direct health problems like water-borne illness, and other related health risks. Gathering, carrying and purifying water took an enormous amount of people's daily time and acted as a serious impediment to economic development, especially in rural areas. Water, Thum realized, was at the core of so many problems in the developing world at large. He wrote down his original idea on a napkin: launch a company that would provide water and raise money for clean water programs in the developing world.

He set to implementing that vision in 2002. Thum left his job at McKinsey Company and founded Ethos and became president of Ethos Brands, LLC. Over the next six years, Thum led Ethos to become a national brand and to raise more than $6 million in humanitarian water grants and helped over 420,000 people worldwide. Ethos was acquired by Starbucks in 2005, and Thum stayed on through to 2008, managing Ethos and serving as a director of the Starbucks Foundation. In 2008, he founded givingwater.org to extend his work toward solving the world water crisis. The organization is now serving over 1,000 school children at schools in Kenya.

Thum has since left Starbucks and is advising for-profit and not-for-profit companies on strategy in addition to pursuing his own venture projects. He is currently on the boards for several companies and organizations focused on service including: The Fund for Global Human Rights; USA for UNHCR; The Center for Human Rights Leadership; FEED Projects; The Dean's Council of the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; and Impossible to Possible Ultra-Athletic Adventures.

He is a regular public speaker in the US and abroad, and been profiled by such media outlets as: The New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, CBC News, Need, Business 2.0 and The Yale Journal of Public Health; and has been a guest lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, among others. He received the FACE Africa Humanitarian Award for his work toward alleviating the World Water Crisis.

Thum holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts from Claremont McKenna College. He lives with his wife in New York.