Primary Job Title Member of the Board of Directors Primary Organization 
Central Asia Institute
Location Bozeman, Montana, United States Regions Western US Gender Male
Website gregmortenson.com X (Twitter) View on X
Greg Mortenson is the Co-Founder of nonprofit Central Asia Institute, Founder of Pennies For Peace, Co-Author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, Author of the bestsellerStones into Schools.
In 2009, Greg received Pakistan’s highest civil award, Sitara-e-Pakistan (“Star of Pakistan”) for his dedicated and humanitarian effort
to promote education and literacy in rural areas for fifteen years. Several bi-partisan U.S. Congressional representatives have nominated Greg twice for the Nobel Peace Prize in both 2009 and 2010.
Greg was born in Minnesota in 1957. Greg grew up on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania (1958 to 1973). Greg's father Dempsey, co-founded Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC) a teaching hospital and his mother, Jerene, founded the International School Moshi www.ismoshi.org.
Greg served in the U.S. Army in Germany (1977-1979), where he received the Army Commendation Medal and graduated from the University of South Dakota in 1983.
In July 1992, Mortenson’s sister, Christa, died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy on the eve of a trip to visit Dysersville, Iowa, where the baseball movie, ‘Field of Dreams’, was filmed in a cornfield. To honor his sister’s memory, in 1993, Mortenson climbed Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain in the Karakoram range. While recovering from the climb in a village called Korphe, Mortenson met a group of children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand, and made a promise to help them build a school. From that rash promise, grew a remarkable humanitarian campaign, in which Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Greg's work has not been without difficulty. In 1996, he survived an eight day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Pakistan’ Northwest Frontier Province tribal areas, escaped a 2003 firefight with feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under putrid animal hides in a truck going to a leather-tanning factory. Greg has overcome fatwehs from enraged Islamic mullahs, endured CIA investigations and also received threats from fellow Americans after 9/11, for helping Muslim children with education.
Greg is a living hero to rural communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, military commanders, government officials and tribal chiefs from his tireless effort to champion education, especially for girls. Greg is one of few foreigners who has worked for over a decade in rural villages where few foreigners go, and considered the ‘front lines’ of the ‘war on terror’
