C. Gregg Petersmeyer
Chair, America's Promise Alliance; Founder & CEO, Personal Pathways, LLC
Gregg Petersmeyer is founder and CEO of Personal Pathways LLC, an information technology company whose flagship service is EffectiveTeams™. He was the lead architect of the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future in 1997 in Philadelphia which began America’s Promise. He served in various executive leadership positions for the Alliance during its early years, including as acting CEO in 2004, and is a founding board member of the organization.
Mr. Petersmeyer began his business career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in New York and as a senior officer and director of General Atlantic Energy Corp., a private oil and gas exploration and production company in Denver. He has served on the White House staffs of two presidents and as a state chairman of a presidential campaign. Mr. Petersmeyer was asked to design the Presidential Summit in Philadelphia because of his role on President George H.W. Bush’s senior White House staff where he served as Assistant to the President and Director of the first White House Office of National Service. He had created and led the White House’s “Points of Light” initiative and was instrumental to the creation of the Points of Light Foundation and the signing of the 1990 federal legislation that established the Commission on National and Community Service, the forerunner of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Defining “Points of Light” as ordinary Americans who take direct and consequential voluntary action to solve serious problems in their own communities, under Mr. Petersmeyer’s leadership President Bush was the first president in American history to institute a daily presidential recognition program from the White House, conferring 1,020 Daily Point of Light Awards between 1989 and 1993.
Mr. Petersmeyer is on the City Year national board; an advisory board member of Oxford Analytica, First Focus, and the Points of Light Institute; a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and The Potomac School; a member of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Council; and an emeritus trustee of Sweet Briar College. He is also the chairman of The Fitzie Foundation that annually recognizes and rewards outstanding girls and young women from four schools in the Boston area attended by his first wife who died of cancer in 1985. He is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University; and Harvard Business School.