Ellen Gustafson

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, Gustafson 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, Gustafson 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. Gustafson 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, New York University, London School of Economics, Columbia and the US Naval Academy and given 4 TEDx talks.