College Announces Graduation Speakers
Bill Shore, C’77, founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, and Laura Sorice, C’16, will speak at this year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences. The event will take place on Sunday, May 15, at 6:30 pm, at Franklin Field.
Inspired by the Ethiopian famine in 1984, siblings Bill and Debbie Shore founded Share Our Strength to help address global hunger and poverty. The nonprofit organization’s No Kid Hungry initiative works to end child hunger in America by connecting children and their families to local resources that provide food and nutrition education. Based in Washington, D.C., Share Our Strength has raised and invested more than $528 million in the fight against hunger.
A native of Pittsburgh, Pa., Bill Shore earned a B.A. in political science from Penn and a J.D. from George Washington University. He worked on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs of former U.S. Senator Gary Hart and as chief of staff for former Senator Robert Kerrey. He has also served as a director of the Timberland Company, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and an advisor for the Reynolds Foundation Fellowship program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 2014 to 2015, Bill served as a Congressional appointee to the National Commission on Hunger, a group tasked with finding innovative ways to end hunger in America. Shore is the author of four books on social change, including Revolution of the Heart, The Cathedral Within, The Light of Conscience, and The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men. U.S. New and World Report named him one of America’s Best Leaders in 2005.
Laura Sorice, from Old Bridge, N.J., is a political science major with minors in Italian Studies and Urban Studies. She has served as chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, vice president of the Chi Omega sorority, and student leader for the PENNacle pre-orientation program for incoming freshmen. In the summer of 2015 Laura was a Fox Leadership Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she performed research in public policy under the direction of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. She is a member of the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honors Society and the Order of Omega Greek Honors Society. Laura has held internships with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Philadelphia Office of the District Attorney. She plans to attend law school and hopes to work in First Amendment law.
