Michael Kors Celebrates 10 Years of His Watch Hunger Stop
An event at the United Nations is always a serious affair. It’s even more sober if it’s held on September 11. But a gathering on that day this year was anything but. Michael Kors wouldn’t have had it any other way. There were diplomats and there were New York Fashion Week busy bees, some fresh off his show earlier in the day. “People who rarely encounter each other, all together for one reason: to fight hunger,” he says. “It was special.”
The occasion wasn’t just a special party, it was marking a milestone he shares with T&C’s Philanthropy Summit: a 10th anniversary. In Kors’s case, of Watch Hunger Stop, the initiative the designer launched to benefit the United Nations World Food Programme and its mission to provide school meals to children throughout the developing world. To date, his campaign has raised some $7.5 million, which translates into the delivery of more than 30 million meals. And this year Kors has committed to increasing his support from 3 million to 4 million meals. “The dream, of course, would be to see a significant decrease in the number of children going to bed hungry each night,” Kors says.
The World Food Programme, founded in 1961, is the largest humanitarian group in the world, and it has set 2030 as its goal for zero global hunger. But ongoing international crises, from military conflict to climate change, including the recent emergencies in Libya and Morocco, are only likely to increase the need for efforts like Watch Hunger Stop to fortify the organization for the future. Alongside his longtime advocacy for God’s Love We Deliver, the New York nonprofit that delivers meals to people living with serious illnesses, Kors says championing WFP for a decade has taught him the power of allyship, an especially valuable lesson for those whose platforms reach more eyeballs than most nongovernmental organizations. “The other thing I’ve learned,” Kors says, “and this is hard for me: You have to be patient. Change takes time. But it happens.”
This story appears in the November 2023 issue of Town & Country.
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