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It is commencement day, and Josette Sheeran is sitting in the Stadium Club overlooking Folsom Field at the University of Colorado. She has just been awarded an honorary degree—Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa—and she could be idly basking in the glow of this distinction.

But Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, is emphatically talking shop with a reporter. She pulls a little red, plastic cup from her purse and talks about the billion people in the world who woke up hungry that day.

The little red cup came from Uganda, and it is one of millions that the WFP uses to distribute free school meals to young children. For Sheeran, the cup is both a container and a symbol.

“Hunger is beatable one cup at a time,” she says.

Sheeran always travels with the little red cup. When she is asked (as she was on commencement day) how one can communicate the staggering scope of world hunger, she wields the cup.

This is what she did three years ago when she appeared on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and the actress Drew Barrymore, then the ambassador for the WFP. Blitzer asked how people know that their donations actually make a difference, and he said hunger was a big problem.

“I said it’s really not that big. It’s one cup at a time,” she recalls. By the time she returned to WFP headquarters in Rome, “we’d gotten hundreds of thousands of donations.”

Simplifying the message is important, Sheeran notes. She adds that it takes a trifling sum—25 cents today—to feed one child one day. A $1.50 donation could feed one child for a week.

Sheeran, a former journalist, understands the need to distill big issues into digestible bites. The red cup does this. “It’s not more complicated than that, really, to access the problem of hunger,” she adds.

She also frames the issue in different, but equally digestible, terms: a billion for a billion. Today, she notes, there are easily a billion people who can afford to fill this cup. If each person does, problem solved.

It’s not quite solved, but the WFP is striding in the right direction. The largest humanitarian agency fighting world hunger, it has 90 million beneficiaries in 73 countries annually. On average, it delivers 3.7 million tons of food annually.

Though Sheeran is responsible for raising every penny that the WFP spends, she says she doesn’t let the size of the task overwhelm her. “When I’m thinking about communications skills, I’m thinking about literally keeping a child alive.”

More generally, Sheeran says, people are more likely to be moved to fight world hunger when they understand the level of insecurity in the world. Americans might not understand the vulnerability of the world’s poorest people. “If they don’t have that help (with food), they’re literally on the brink between life and death.”

In her younger days, Sheeran says she never dreamed she’d ultimately work for the United Nations. Her varied career began at CU, where she earned a degree in communications in 1976.

She served as managing director of Starpoint Solutions, a Wall Street technology firm. She also served as president of Empower America, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank since merged with Freedom Works.

Sheeran also served as managing editor of The Washington Times and twice served as a Pulitzer Prize juror.

In 2006, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed her to the High-level U.N. Panel on System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment. She also served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Prior to that, she served in the Bush administration’s U.S. State Department as under secretary for economic, energy and agricultural affairs.

In 2007, she was appointed executive director of the WFP, a position that fits her values and background. Sheeran recalls organizing her first fund-raiser for those in need when she was 11 years old. She sent an envelope full of cash to the New York Times’ Fresh Air Fund, which allowed impoverished, inner-city children to go camping and experience nature in other ways.

Sheeran’s philanthropic work was also foreshadowed by the deeds of her father, who parachuted into France on D-Day. He was captured and was a prisoner of war until he escaped and was protected by the French Resistance.

After returning from World War II, his first act was to organize a food drive “to send food back to the French underground people who helped him.”

As Sheeran prepares to leave the Folsom Club, bustling with university dignitaries enjoying a hearty brunch, she notes that in 24 hours, she’ll be in Haiti, living in a tent. Though physically challenging, the experience is emotionally rewarding, she adds.

“I have been more touched by the beauty of humanity among people who have nothing than (by) anyone else.”

Sheeran is also amazed by the gratitude of people who have “every reason to hate.” They are, she adds, “my teachers.”

In Boulder, Sheeran adds, “People have the freedom to think about others … I have a dream to connect the university to our work against hunger globally.”

“I leave here with that dream.”

For more information about hunger and how to get involved, see the teachers/student section of www.wfp.org.