Taylor Swift – the generous role model | Opinion

Taylor Swift is the first billionaire in music history to earn her fortune solely through songwriting and performing. She is also one of the most successful musicians of all time, earning over $1.3 billion to date. And she shares that wealth with the hard-working people who make her incredible performances possible. Amazingly, Swift paid out more than $50 million in bonuses to her crew members who worked on her Eras Tour last year.

In addition to her financial success, Swift is also a world-class athlete in phenomenal shape. She just danced and sang for nearly four hours straight in front of 90,000 screaming fans – known as Swifties – performing 45 songs. Numbers courtesy of world-class athletes Travis and Jason Kelce.

Imagine how mentally, physically and emotionally fit she must be to perform at this level in over 100 shows across five continents. This is a level of performance we normally only associate with global sporting icons.

Why is this important? It’s important because we have strong associations with words. We expect them to mean certain things. Taylor the musician is creative, authentic, uplifting. But Taylor the athlete? She’s unstoppable. How does she do it? At least in part through her commitment to staying fit through a healthy diet, an important contributor to a strong body and mind.

As a philanthropist, Swift has donated to countless causes. In 2012, she pledged $4 million to Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame to provide educational music programs for local children, and in 2014, she donated $100,000 to keep the struggling Nashville Symphony Orchestra alive.

Her commitment to children’s education is long-standing and enormous. In 2011, she donated $70,000 worth of books to the Reading Public Library in Pennsylvania. In 2015, she donated $50,000 to New York Public Schools. And she has pledged to donate all future royalties from her song “Welcome to New York” to the school system. That’s a huge amount.

While on tour, Taylor likes to donate to the local food banks where she performs to help feed hundreds of thousands of people in each city. She recently did this in California and Tampa, as well as internationally by supporting a UK food bank to provide a year’s worth of meals to a local community. Hunger and malnutrition are a global tragedy – one in eight households (12.8 percent) in the US are food insecure, and overall more than 700 million people worldwide suffer from hunger every day, including 80 million more women than men.

Beyond her own donations, Taylor is a catalyst for change through her music and long-standing fan base. She constantly encourages her fans to donate to their favorite causes and groups to make a difference in their own communities. Taylor once told Country Music Television (CMT), “I started volunteering when I was about 12 years old, and I didn’t really know I was volunteering at the time. That’s the cool thing about volunteering – it costs nothing except your time.”

Swift is a strong advocate for women-owned businesses. This is great for many reasons – first, they tend to be more successful entrepreneurs. Second, women’s economic empowerment is associated with improvements in key nutritional indicators for these women and their households.

Taylor also supports access to fresh, clean and safe drinking water. Another great strategy to combat malnutrition – not only because water, hygiene and sanitation are important factors in nutritional outcomes, but also because women and girls spend twice as much time fetching water outside the home as men and boys. This burden comes on top of so many others, including feeding and caring for children.

Already known as a global music icon and increasingly recognized as a world-class athlete, Taylor Swift is now time to recognize her for her philanthropic spirit as well. Through her music and donations, she is a strong advocate and role model for the empowerment of girls and women.

Matt Freeman is the executive director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.