Barbara Bush (born 1981)


Barbara Pierce Bush is an American activist. She co-founded and is the chair of the board of the non-profit organization Global Health Corps. She and her fraternal twin sister Jenna are the daughters of the 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. She is also a granddaughter of former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, after whom she is named.

Early life

Barbara Pierce Bush was born at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. When the family lived in the Preston Hollow section of Dallas, she and her twin sister, Jenna, attended Preston Hollow Elementary School; Laura Bush served on Preston Hollow's Parent-Teacher Association at that time. Later, Barbara and Jenna attended The Hockaday School in Dallas. When her father became Governor of Texas in 1994, Barbara attended St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. She began Austin High School in 1996, graduating with the class of 2000.
Bush attended Yale University, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She lives in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.
In 2001, Bush was charged with possession of alcohol as a minor.

Career

She worked for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, a subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution. Previously, she had been working with AIDS patients in Africa: Tanzania, South Africa, and Botswana, among other places, through a program sponsored by the Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine's International Pediatrics AIDS Initiative.

Global Health Corps

She is the co-founder and president of a public health-focused nonprofit, Global Health Corps. Global Health Corps provides opportunities for young professionals from diverse backgrounds to work on the front lines of the fight for global health equity. In 2009, Global Health Corps won a Draper Richards Foundation Fellowship, and Bush was made a 2009 Echoing Green fellow for her work with Global Health Corps. Bush was also chosen as one of the 14 speakers selected from an applicant pool of 1,500 to speak at the TEDx Brooklyn event in December 2010, where she spoke about Global Health Corps.

Political activity

In 2011, Bush released a video with the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization, calling on New York State to legalize same-sex marriage. "'I am Barbara Bush, and I am a New Yorker for marriage equality,' she says in the brief message, sponsored by an advocacy group. 'New York is about fairness and equality. And everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love.'" Bush joined other children of prominent Republican politicians—including Meghan McCain and Mary Cheney—in endorsing gay marriage.
Bush's graduation from Yale in May 2004 was given heavy media coverage. She and Jenna made several media appearances that summer prior to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, including giving a speech to the Republican Convention on August 31. The two took turns traveling to swing states with their father and also gave a seven-page interview and photo shoot in Vogue. Bush joined her mother on diplomatic trips to Liberia in January 2006 to attend the inauguration of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and to Vatican City to meet with Pope Benedict XVI in February 2006.
Unlike most of her relatives, Bush is not a member of the Republican Party. In 2010, Bush and her sister told People that they preferred not to identify with any political party, stating, "We're both very independent thinkers."

Personal life

Bush and her sister authored the joint memoir Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life, published in 2017. On October 7, 2018, she married screenwriter Craig Coyne in a private ceremony at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, with only 20 people attending. They held an additional wedding reception six months later in April 2019 with 100 guests.

Works