SOCIAL IMPACT INNOVATOR; SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM ACTIVIST; CO-FOUNDER, WE THE VETERANS; AUTHOR
Ellen Gustafson is president of EG, Inc, an impact-focused consulting business. She is the co-founder of the Military Family Building Coalition, an organization on a mission to help active military members build their families. She co-founded We The Veterans, empowering the veteran and military family community to strengthen American democracy by arming them with the best information possible about the challenges facing our democracy and empowering them to be part of the solutions required to address them.
She is also a sustainable food system activist, author, and innovator. She has been on the cutting edge of the biggest consumer and social trends of the past ten years. As a celebrated early social entrepreneur, respected activist and author and leader in the most prominent movements and causes of our time, she has a proven track record of seeing what's next and what's important in helping to address it.
One of the first entrepreneurs in the BOGO and give-back consumer trend, Ellen co-founded FEED Projects, LLC, a charitable company that creates good products that help FEED the world, and FEED's nonprofit partner, the FEED Foundation. FEED has since provided almost 100 million school meals to children around the world.
As a leading voice in the fight to end hunger, she was an early proponent of the now-common idea that hunger and obesity are linked in a broken food system—not two foreign, stand-alone challenges. Upon release of her first TEDx talk, she founded the 30 Project, a campaign that has helped to change the conversation about the global food system by connecting hunger and obesity, which then led to her early work in helping Danielle Nierenberg start Food Tank: the Food Think Tank.
As the co-director of the Summit Institute, she helps convene the top entrepreneurs and thinkers to take on big global challenges. Her first book, We the Eaters: If We Change Dinner, We Can Change the World, was published by Rodale Press in 2014, and is a smart manifesto on how the American eater shapes the global food system.
Before co-founding FEED, Ellen was a U.S. Spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, a terrorism research reporter in the ABC News Investigative Unit, and a research associate for the Military Fellows at the Council on Foreign Relation. She has a BA in International Politics from Columbia University.
She has been featured as one of AOL and PBS's MAKERS, trailblazing women who are "making" America, Fortune's 2009 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, Inc.'s 2010 30 Under 30, and Diplomatic Courier's 2011 "Top 99 Under 33" in Foreign Policy. Ellen has spoken at the Fortune Most Powerful Women's Conference, the World Food Prize, and was the co-chair of the Economist's Feeding the World Conference. She has guest lectured at Harvard, Yale, NYU, London School of Economics, Columbia and the US Naval Academy and given 4 TEDx talks.
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Ellen Gustafson, co-founder and co-executive director of We the Veterans, delves into the critical role that veterans and military families play in upholding democracy and combating misinformation. In this talk, Ellen highlights how the trust and leadership within this diverse community can be harnessed to counter hate-fueled ideologies and political violence. Ellen shares insights from the successful initiatives such as "Vet the Vote" initiative, demonstrating their continued service to the nation by ensuring the integrity of elections and fostering civic engagement. Through her work, she's ensuring veterans are not just defending the country but actively protecting the democratic process at home.
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Women and mothers all faced intense challenges in the face of the pandemic and the government response. As an entrepreneur, mother of three young children and military spouse of a deployed husband, Ellen Gustafson felt the double burden that many other women also felt with real fears around the virus and the abrupt societal shutdown that it necessitated. But now that society is reopening, there’s an opportunity like never before to build a new system of work that not just includes women, but favors their needs and, thereby, makes work healthier for everyone—parents or not. Ellen argues America is at a most unique moment of opportunity for all women—the time when we finally make the workplace friendly to workers and their families. Ellen shares her experience co-founding a new military family organization during the pandemic and her involvement with the Care Force founding coalition, which is the women-led movement behind making the care economy part of our national infrastructure and the Marshall Plan for Moms.
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From our sustainable food choices to our move toward walkable urban lifestyles to our consumer fascination with BOGO and fair trade, the Millennial generation has continued to make sustainable living & giving some of the hottest trends. As a trailblazer in give-back social enterprise (co-founding FEED) and an early voice in changing food systems, Ellen discusses how she's studied and been a part of shaping the trends that make up the new, hip and healthy Main Street. "Take a walk" with her as she explains how all of this continues to take shape in your local communities and how consumer behaviors may affect your next business pivot.
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On a global scale, there's a very large percentage of us who are either suffering from obesity or from hunger. Far from complete opposites, hunger and obesity are in fact different manifestations of the same problem: it's increasingly difficult to find and eat nutritious food. By outlining the common roots of the problems of one billion hungry and one billion overweight on the planet today, Ellen lays out a compelling case for the system being the problem as well as a few simple things that all people can do to push towards a better global food system.
Twitter: @ellengustafson
Instagram: @ellengustafson1