From Down Under to Mt. Airy, Peg has done it all

by PAMELA ROGOW

This is the second of a two-part series about how international fundraiser Peg Thatcher, a Mt. Airy resident, came to develop the perspective and determination that have propelled her to a life of bounty and service.

"I was always interested in money. We weren't short of money at home -- there was no poverty -- but from an early age I watched its flow," says Peg, a native of Australia who is now a Mr. Airy resident as well as a longtime fundraiser for the Hunger Project and now OIC International, based in Germantown. 

"When I was five, a half dozen of us self-styled gymnasts started charging for demos at kid's parties. I was the treasurer. We made t-shirts -- Kid Kat Klub -- and kept minutes of our club. By the time I was 6, I could do a forward spin and come back up .... We were self-taught -- until the kids started to break their arms. I think I kept the money and bought 'lollies' with it. I don't recall sharing it! I didn't know about distributing the money.

"My friend Susie had a cleft palate. Fifty years ago, they often didn't get the operation right. Only her mother and I could understand her. No one else gave her an inch. People were brutal to her. So I determined that I would be a speech therapist. I didn't know that term, but I knew my job was to make a difference for people like her. So I started to learn elocution at seven. I spent years preparing to become a fellow at Trinity College in London, where I would get formal training. At 14, I was the youngest person to take the entrance exams for Trinity."

For her 10th birthday present, Peg asked to give a Christmas party for the nearby orphanage. She collected donations from neighborhood stores for the stockings. It was a huge, fabulous party. Santa Claus showed up.

"But then we left. We went outside the fence -- it felt more like bars to me by then -- and the kids were inside the bars. The gates shut. My dad was the Santa Claus. They didn't have dads. I'm holding my daddy's hand. The party was over, and they were still orphans with who knows what in their future, or even every day lives.

"I realized that we had made no difference at all. That it might have been awful for the kids in the orphanage. That I'd done something terrible, giving them a taste of what they didn't have. This was the first thing I 'did for the world.' It didn't work and I knew it. I cried for a year. But I knew finally that the thing I wanted to do was: Make a Difference." 

A few years later, Peg had another shock -- Trinity College had rejected her for applying too young -- the youngest Australian ever to sit for its entrance exams. And then the local university rejected her for its speech therapy training, for being too short. Probably for being a too-short woman, she says now. Peg had not yet grown to her full 4'10" and the college claimed that she could not be "commanding enough," especially with foreigners. 

"This was catastrophic. I hadn't thought about doing anything else, ever. I'd been fixated on speech therapy since I was 7. I'd read anything I could find about muscular systems, linguistics ... I left the room where they gave me this news: Finished."

Even Peg's success as a state discus athlete brought her little satisfaction. Disheartened, she dropped out of high school, "fiddled" at a bank and tried secretarial school. "Man, I'm not doing this," she thought. 

Eventually Peg opened a beauty parlor where she offered a massage service and later started a catering company. She married at 19 and left with her husband, a college math lecturer, for Fiji where they had two sons and a daughter. They both worked in Fiji as missionaries, in the Christadelphian church. But by the end of her term in Fiji, Peg came to believe that missionary work was culturally intrusive and not something she would continue.

Back in Australia, the Thatchers bought a 1,300-acre farm and raised pigs and goats. The farm was similar to her early life at the guest house, in that work got done, regardless ... "Cows get milked," as the saying goes. Eventually that life felt too "hermit-like" to Peg, and the family moved to Sydney.

There she became an urbanite, with her own award-winning radio show -- one of the first media outlets in Australia whose focus included vitamins and minerals for health. She studied real estate and eventually built a chain of small restaurants. 

In early 1990s, Peg's older son, then 20, was involved in a serious boating accident and was not expected to live. The experience changed her life in several ways, including a deepening of her commitment to help others. She knew that the care she was able to obtain for her son was not available to most people. But she also knew that no amount of money could save him either. After her son recovered, Peg committed to the Hunger Project.

Then she "did the Forum" -- the Landmark Forum. It's an educational organization founded in 1950s that's thriving today worldwide. Some Landmark people spawned the Hunger Project, whose mission is to end world hunger; Peg became Australia's country director. "It is the most effective organization I have ever worked in," Peg says. Hunger has decreased globally since the Hunger Project Began its work, but The Hunger Project zoomed from a $2 million annual budget to $7 million while she was its global funding director, a position that brought her to New York in 1997.

Now Peg is planning to teach workshops at the Moving Arts Studio of Mt. Airy. Her first, beginning soon, is called "Human Potential 101. "I want to help people get something done that they've been avoiding, whether it's for their entire life or a few years," she explained. "It is about getting Some Thing Done -- and with ease and grace. It may be something that they would just dream about doing. It could be clean out the basement. But it could also be a big idea that we don't know how to start. You don't have to know what that something is when you begin."

The Moving Arts Studio is at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Greene Street. Participants can start October 11. For information or registration, call 215-842-1040.