Walter Piacsek || New York, NY, Sao Paolo, Brazil

Entrepreneur & Consultant

Hi everyone, my name is Walter Piacsek and I am excited to be a facilitator in the LifeDesign course with Steve and Tom. My connection with Notre Dame is quite recent, but no less meaningful to me because of that - there is something about ND ethos of being a force for good that got me hooked ever since I was a member of the inaugural class of the Inspired Leadership Initiative program 2 years ago and took one of Steve’s classes. I live in NYC but am originally from Brazil, having worked and studied in the US for my MBA in the 1990s, in 2018 at ND for the ILI program and in 2019 at Harvard in a fellowship focused on social impact. I had a long corporate career in management consulting, banking and private equity but went back to school with the plan of having a next professional phase with a much greater social impact footprint. Incidentally, early this year I approached Notre Dame with an idea to create a service job program for recent graduates and, alongside another of our facilitators, my friend and ILI colleague Marty Whalen, launched a program at Arts & Letters called Beyond the Dome Service Corps, connecting the Class of 2020 with paid service jobs. Along these lines, I am a believer of leveraging one’s skills and experiences for greater good, and that is what I will try to do more of going forward.