Ian founded Thread and Team Tassy in 2012 in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. Team Tassy places the poor into jobs. Thread takes trash from poor neighborhoods & turns it into fabric. They sell the fabric to apparel and accessories brands to help them improve authenticity, transparency, and responsibility. Both organizations work together under the same core philosophy: the biggest problem we face as a species is multidimensional poverty; to end it, we need to invest in the poor to create as many dignified, sustainable jobs as possible. To date, Team Tassy has engaged almost 500 Haitians, preparing them and their families for employment. Thread has shipped nearly 40,000,000 plastic bottles out of Haiti and Honduras to be turned into high-performance materials. So far the network supports nearly 3000 jobs Ian started his career in storytelling after placing 3rd on CBS: Survivor, where he realized the power media can have to influence action. He worked as a producer for MTV before starting his first company, a short-form media production startup, which took him to Africa for the first time in 2006. It was there that a friend introduced him to a community in Zambia being destroyed by the AIDS crisis and he realized he wanted to work with the poor.  Thread has afforded him the opportunity to combine his interests into something that uses content and data to promote action within the poverty epidemic and create a great deal of value for brands.  Ian is a 2013 University of Pittsburgh Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership Awardee. He is a 2013 Dignity and Respect Champion and a 2017 JVP Humanitarian. He has spoken about Thread and Team Tassy’s work for Harvard Business School, TEDx, and One Young World, and his work has been featured in Fast Company, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post.  He is an ultramarathoner, and in February 2015 founded and participated in the first Run Across Haiti, which has raised nearly  $500,000 to date for Team Tassy’s work in Haiti. To date, he has raised over $7 Million to end poverty and create jobs. Ian lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, Raashi. They both believe that ending poverty is possible by the time they have grandchildren.