Bio

 

Peter Teague has served as a senior strategist and director for national grant-making foundations in New York and San Francisco, senior policy advisor in the U.S. House and Senate, attorney, Peace Corps Volunteer and Executive Director of a think tank and a community foundation.

Peter's work has focused on developing fresh approaches to intractable problems. Peter has consistently sought new perspectives and a better understanding of how people with different ways of seeing the world might find the capacity, skill and generosity to make a better future together.  

Peter has been instrumental in creating and nurturing a number of ground-breaking initiatives, including climate strategies that harmonize economic development and environmental justice with a rapid clean energy transition.

Peter serves as senior advisor on climate change to both the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust. In that capacity he is working to help design grant making strategies for one of the world’s largest private climate change philanthropies, and one of its newest. For the Democracy Funders Network and the Omidyar Network he has examined the rise of authoritarianism and threats to our democracy.  For George Soros' Open Society Institute, Peter designed and ran the country's largest needle-exchange funding program.

As Program Director, then Chief Strategy Officer and finally Senior Vice President at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York, Peter directed ground-breaking grant making programs emphasizing the importance of developing new ways of seeing human and environmental challenges. 

As the Executive Director of the Breakthrough Institute, Peter spent significant time in Southeast Asia, India and East Africa, focusing on women as agents of change and developing even more expansive approaches to these challenges. 

In each of his roles - from Peace Corps volunteer, to senior policy advisor to elected officials including Leon Panetta, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, attorney and Executive Director - Peter has succeeded on the strength of creativity, insight and supportive leadership, the ability to foster innovative environments, and excellent relationship skills.