About Us
The Feeding Your Kids Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating a free international nutrition education program for parents. Founded in 2010 and written as a Clinton Global Initiative commitment in 2009, the program has reached families in more than 185 countries. It was developed by Eszter Erdélyi, a behavior scientist and the program’s author, and is supported operationally by the Foundation.
Eszter Erdélyi | Founder & CEO, Program Author, and Behavior Scientist
Eszter Erdélyi is a behavior scientist and the author of the Feeding Your Kids program. She specializes in practical behavior change for parents and caregivers, and teaches behavior science in the PhD program at Budapest Technical University. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, consulted for businesses and governments in Europe for several years, and originally wrote the Feeding Your Kids program as a pro bono Clinton Global Initiative commitment in 2009. She is the mother of two sons (now 23 and 27) and lives in San Francisco.
CAREY WHITE | CHAIRMAN
Carey White is Chairman of the Feeding Your Kids Foundation, which he co-founded with Eszter Erdélyi in 2010. He is also CEO of Positive Arts Capital and co-founded Active Wellness, a fitness services management company with 35 locations and 500 employees across the United States and Canada. He is a six-time CFO and has served as a board member of public and private companies. Carey has a BA from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard. He is a Certified Public Accountant (inactive) in the state of California. Carey designed and built the technical infrastructure that delivers and improves the Feeding Your Kids program. He lives in San Francisco and is married to Eszter Erdélyi.
HOW IT STARTED
First, about the program itself: The program uses daily messaging and behavior change science to help people change their habits. It takes place over a period of weeks and is served directly to the user in digestible and understandable packets. Its power comes from being architected around the challenges, practical and psychological, faced by parents trying to feed and teach their children in a challenging environment.
Many years ago, for the Clinton Global Initiative, Eszter and Carey volunteered to perform primary research which led us to the conclusion that the most cost-effective way to achieve the target goal of reducing obesity in the overall society was not to target children and teens directly, but rather to talk to parents, guiding them to change their behaviors and provide their children with positive habits early on.
You can find the original version of logic model (how we hypothesize it works to achieve change) here.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Once we had written the program, the next problem was: how do we tell people it’s there? Since we had no money to advertise the program, we tried the simplest possible approach just to learn something: we turned on Google Ads. We had no idea how to use it, and when Carey was setting it up, he accidentally clicked the box for “World” instead of “U.S.” The next day, he couldn’t figure out why people were signing up from everywhere.
And they kept signing up from everywhere. For weeks, we kept watching more countries pop up. It was one of the best times either one of us have ever had with a new company or new product.
We have now had people sign up and use the program from over 185 countries.
We have run the program as a private operating foundation at our cost since 2011. We are really happy that we can help.
