“Close your eyes and imagine the last time you were hungry.  Did you feel tired or lethargic?  Now open your eyes.  That is the feeling 795 million people around the world feel every day.”  said Lauren Bush Lauren as she introduced her passion of combating world hunger.       
Bush Lauren, the CEO of FEED, a foundation dedicated to raising funds to support programs that effectively work to fight hunger and eliminate malnutrition throughout the world, gave a lecture on April 24 at the Annenberg Conference Center about the history and future of her foundation.
The Mosbacher Institute of the Bush School of Government and Service invited Bush Lauren as part of its annual Bank of America Program on Volunteerism.  According to director of the institute Lori Taylor, the program introduces the idea of a social business.

 “Lauren Bush Lauren has been doing great things in trying to develop a business that exists to fill philanthropic rule,” Taylor said.  “We really hope the non-profit management students will benefit from her insight.”
As the granddaughter of former president George H.W. Bush and niece of former president George W. Bush, Bush Lauren said her desire to enter public service came with her family background.
“I grew up with a grandfather who exuded the fact that public service was the life to have,” Bush Lauren said.  “I am so grateful that my beginnings were looking up to him and wanting to do good in the world.”
Bush Lauren’s passion to help solve the world hunger problem truly began on a trip she took to Guatemala with the UN World Food Programme during her time at Princeton University.
“I took a trip to Guatemala where I first-hand saw kids born into a life of poverty and hunger,” Bush Lauren said.  “A mother came up to me and put her son in my arms.  I thought he was four or five years old, but he was seven years old.  I saw the effects of chronic malnutrition and hunger just because of where he was born.”
Bush Lauren said she always loved design and fashion as well as a desire to give back.  She decided to combine these passions to create a purse design that could help others.

“I thought, ‘Why not create a consumer good product that people can be proud of and organically give back?’” Bush Lauren said. “I created the FEED bag where one bag could feed one child for one year.  We have partnerships with Whole Foods and Target to fund money back to programs on the ground. We have given out about 95 million meals.”
For those who have a passion to help, but don’t exactly know how, Bush Lauren said there are more paths now than ever before to follow your passions.
“I encourage you to dig deep on your personal passions in a way that is uniquely yours and yours only,” Bush Lauren said.  “Throughout 10 years of FEED, I have found that passion is contagious.”  
Business sophomore Maria Pope said she learned a lot about connecting for-profit businesses to a mission for helping others through the lecture.
“The way that she has designed her business provides a lot of opportunity for growth and to give back in a way that is not quite like the nonprofits that we already have established,” Pope said.  
The FEED project will for now for the first time go from an all-online business, to a store and café where the products will be sold and profits donated to eradicating world hunger.
“We are getting ready to launch FEED store and café in Brooklyn, New York.  Everything in it will give back; every muffin, latte and feed bag will give back,” Bush Lauren said.  “The goal is to go from a world that needs feed, to a world that is well-fed and well-nourished.”