Amy Houston
Adjunct Professor of Business, Management
Columbia Business School
Amy Houston runs the Thompson Family Foundation, which funds historic preservation, arts and culture, medical research and social services in New York City. Founded by Wade Thompson in 1986, the foundation was instrumental in the revitalization of the Park Avenue Armory.
Amy previously ran management assistance and administrative operations at Robin Hood. Robin Hood targets poverty in New York City by finding and funding the most effective programs and partnering with them to achieve results. Since inception Robin Hood has provided over a billion dollars through a model that combines targeted funding with management assistance to support its nonprofits in strengthening their performance.
Prior to Robin Hood, she was a vice president at Aspect Education, a private company running language schools worldwide. She joined Aspect’s senior team just after its purchase from Sylvan Learning Systems in 2000; the company was sold successfully to Kaplan in 2006. She was also a principal consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers’ higher education and nonprofit practice and the general manager of a nonprofit focused on school reform in Chicago.
Amy earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. She previously served on the advisory council at Tuck and the board of the Nichols School in Buffalo. She also co-founded and served on the board of the Mad Housers of Chicago, a homeless advocacy organization. She is currently a trustee of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, where she chairs the finance committee.