The History of Nourish
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In the fall of 2002 Sindhura Citineni had a life changing experience. While browsing the Internet for hunger-related news she chanced upon a rapidly blinking map that stated “Each time a country changes color, another person dies from hunger.” Sindhura felt shocked, depressed and powerless to make a change. However, her powerlessness lasted only as long as it took to start brainstorming. She decided she could and would make a difference.
Sindhura based her efforts on an ingenious business idea adopted from Kelly Fogelman of the UNC Medical School. Using $400 of her own money and an intense passion for the cause, Sindhura worked out an exclusive deal with Carolina Dining Services and began selling a simple selection of food items to university students and staff. The venture, called Hunger Lunch (HL), provided customers with a very affordable meal, while giving them the opportunity to contribute to the funding of hunger-relief work. By the end of HL's first year a regular crowd of over 300 customers attended each bimonthly lunch. Raising over $200 per lunch, HL had become a well-known staple meal on UNC's campus.
Sindhura hoped that the funds generated would ensure sustainable impact on an impoverished community. In HL's first year all the profits raised by selling lunches – over $7,500 – were taken by Sindhura and Maria Thekkekandam to support children in one of the largest slum areas in Hyderabad, India. There, the two researched and met with multiple leaders and not-for-profits, working hard to form partnerships between local communities and organizations. Within three short months, together they set up a “Nutrition House” where over 150 children would be served a high-protein, high-calcium supplementary drink 3 times weekly for over 4 years.
Sindhura continued to grow the program under the name, Hunger Lunch, until she and a team of seven other students sat down to figure out a way to expand the model they had created. They entered a business plan UNC business plan competition, the Carolina Challenge, and decided that they needed to scale their operations from UNC to other campuses. They changed the name to Nourish International and realized they needed to create a nonprofit organization separate from the university to grow and sustain chapters at different colleges. The team took second place in the competition, reaffirming their need to pursue their dream of creating a national network of students operating on the Nourish model.
The business plan had a long way to go. Sindhura, the oldest and most experienced in the group had recently graduated and the team was still mostly undergraduate students. Therefore, Nourish applied for Launch the Venture, an intensive course offered by Kenan-Flagler Business school to help launch new ventures. The course placed them with a coach, Kelly Boone, who played in instrumental role in developing the early stage operations of Nourish. What was our mission? Could we explain it in 1 minute? 30 seconds? 10 seconds? How would we expand? How would we become sustainable? How would we launch? During the fall of 2005, the team (Sindhura, Joel Thomas and Bryon Zandt) conducted a market feasibility study to verify that the soil was right for growing their idea. They surveyed 138 students, mapped out the yearly finances they would need to achieve their mission, and put together a 5 minute elevator pitch they could give to anyone. During the spring of 2006, the team built a marketing plan, expansion strategy, and a board of directors composed of the best and brightest in the UNC community. They drew their experience from their work on the ground developing Hunger Lunch at UNC. They fine tuned their vision at the Kenan-Flagler Business school, an institution focused heavily on commercial entrepreneurship and sustainability. Our motivation and passion was inherent. We were possessed by an idea – to create a network of students to reduce poverty. The dream was to have students be able to find others working on the same issue, share ideas, and feel like they were a part of something bigger than themselves. Our value add would be the information and experience we could share with everyone, and eventually each chapter, each student, could share with the rest of the network.
Since 2005, what was known as Hunger Lunch evolved into Nourish International, a non profit that connects college students from universities around the nation to development projects abroad. Our range of money making Ventures has expanded to include poker tournaments, swing dances, and dance jams; essentially anything where a student would have fun participating. We’ve held 9 international projects and have further developed our mission to include evaluation & feedback services that better communicate the needs of the poor to donors in the rich world.