Minh-Thu Pham

Minh-Thu Pham is a champion of collective problem-solving to tackle our biggest challenges. She co-founded New American Voices, which mobilizes Asian American voters, and advises foundations and non-profits on global trends and institutions. During the primary, she was an advisor on Pete Buttigieg’s foreign policy team and a policy volunteer for Biden for President. Previously, she was Executive Director of Global Policy at the United Nations Foundation, where for 10 years she led initiatives to make the UN more effective, tackle climate change and poverty (helping to create the Sustainable Development Goals), and improving relations between the U.S. and the UN. Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan after the Iraq War and has worked in Bosnia and Ethiopia.

Minh-Thu serves on the Advisory Council of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, where she received her MPA; is a Leadership Now Project member of thought leaders working to fix our democracy, a Truman National Security Project fellow, and named a 2020 AAPI National Security & Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader. She was a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow. She graduated from Duke, where she wrote a thesis on the student and Buddhist movement in 1960s Saigon. She’s a lifelong follower of Thich Nhat Hanh.

As a PIVOT board member, she hopes to offer what she knows from policy, politics, strategy, and building bridges. She is deeply concerned about the direction of our democracy; she thinks Vietnamese Americans’ shared war and refugee history enables us to understand the consequences of a divided country and therefore support a more inclusive and cohesive society. Minh-Thu left Vietnam by boat at age 3, spent eight months in a refugee camp in Indonesia, and resettled in TN, eventually moving to NC. She lives in NYC with her husband and two daughters.