Barbara Pierce Bush

Barbara Bush leads the NBA’s efforts around health equity, civic engagement, and social justice as Senior Vice President of Social Impact and Inclusion. In this role, she works with NBA offices across the globe to utilize the convening power of basketball to execute thoughtful, community-driven impact strategies relevant to each market.

Barbara is co-founder and board member of Global Health Corps (GHC), an organization that mobilizes young leaders to solve the world’s most pressing health issues. Barbara served as GHC’s CEO for its first 9 years. Bush and her co-founders are united by the belief that health is a human right and that their generation must build the world where this is realized. Since 2009, GHC has placed thousands of young leaders on the front lines of health equity in East Africa, Southern Africa, and the United States, developing a cadre of creative, effective, and compassionate change-makers.

Previously, Barbara was Executive-in-Residence at Schmidt Futures, a foundation for public benefit focused on technology & society, shared prosperity, and scientific benefit. In this role, she supported racial justice, global health, and COVID-19 investments and programs, along with some of the world’s most talented policy problem solvers, by leading the International Strategy Forum and the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program.

Before joining Global Health Corps’ founding team, Bush worked in educational programming at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where she supported design-thinking and problem-solving programs for high school students and faculty across the US. She has worked with Red Cross Children’s Hospital in South Africa and UNICEF in Botswana. Bush is a member of the board of directors of Partners In Health and Friends of the Global Fight for AIDS, TB, and Malaria. She is a Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur, a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur, and a fellow of the Echoing Green Foundation.

In 2011, Bush was named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year; in 2013 she was recognized as one of Newsweek’s Women of Impact, and in 2015 she was named to Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business list. She has been named as one of the 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs’ Builders and Innovators. In October 2017, Bush released the number one New York Times bestseller Sisters First, a memoir she co-authored with her twin sister. She and her sister, Jenna Hager, have since written four children's books together: the picture book Sisters First, The Superpower Sisterhood, Love Comes First, and I Loved You First, each a New York Times bestseller.

Barbara graduated from Harvard Kennedy School with a Master's in Public Administration as a fellow with the Center for Public Leadership and Yale University with a BA in Humanities. She lives with her husband and their two children, Cora Georgia and Edward Finn.