Goodr and their founder and CEO, Jasmine Crowe-Houston were recently awarded the goBeyondProfit Champion award for developing innovative business solutions that bring countless companies into the fight against hunger and food waste.
Goodr is the story of an Atlanta founder who has reached the admirable goal of being on Fortune’s global list of the top 50 companies changing the world. Yet, in our interview, Jasmine reminds us of her unyielding focus on harnessing the power of business to achieve a singular, audacious goal of ensuring no one ever goes hungry.
From Sunday Soul to For-Profit Solution
When I go back to the beginning of why I started Goodr, it really is rooted in a personal journey of my own. I had been working in the nonprofit space for about seven years, working largely with celebrities as they were starting and running their own nonprofits.
And I was saying to them, the people that are standing in line for Turkey at Thanksgiving are hungry in May as well, that it’s not just a one day a year thing where we need to give and make sure that people have access and that everyone’s going to be able to eat.
One day I went home, and I posted on Facebook that I was starting an initiative called Sunday Soul. It was going to be a pop-up restaurant. We wanted to have tables and chairs and linens and enable people to order off a menu and be treated with dignity as they’re going through this rough patch in their life.
Four years later, a 15-second clip video went viral on Facebook that someone had shared that said — look at what this group did for the homeless community in Atlanta. I woke up the next morning to millions of views and friend requests and thousands of comments. As I was reading through the comments, people kept on saying, this is so amazing, who donated the food? And the truth was no one. I was couponing, price matching, cooking all this food myself. I started to brainstorm how to get food donated and get it to people in…
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