April 10, 2007

President's Report to the Global Board

To:        Members of the Global Board of Directors
From:   Joan Holmes
Re:       Launching Our Transition Year

Executive Summary

On our Board conference call in December, I announced that 2007 would be a major transition year in The Hunger Project, and I will outline the key elements of that transition in this report.

We are making this transition at a time of real strength in our organization:

Our demonstration of scale-up in the Eastern Region of Ghana is on track.
Our programs around the world are strong and getting stronger.
We had a record-breaking year in fundraising – exceeding our ambitious targets – and our 2007 fundraising is significantly ahead of where we were at this time last year.

The Board will play a critical role during this transition in ensuring that The Hunger Project stays true to its principles as it faces the challenges of the future. We are designing our April 22 Board meeting to be an opportunity to examine these challenges in depth.

Transition – from Creation to Building and Evolving

For the past 30 years, The Hunger Project has been in a phase of creation. Our work – time and again – has been to inquire into what is missing which, if provided, would catalyze a breakthrough in the global effort to end hunger, and then we create strategies to provide it.

Our mission from 1977 to 1990 was to change the world’s mindset from one where hunger was seen as inevitable, to one that saw that hunger could end – as well as have the world understand the vital distinction between famine and chronic, persistent hunger. We addressed this through a massive campaign of communication, education and enrollment, and this first mission was accomplished.

For the past 16 years, our mission was to pioneer on-the-ground programs that enable people to become authors of their own development and end their own hunger. This mission – too – has been accomplished.

At our October 2005 Board meeting, I reported to the Board that The Hunger Project was fully created. Through years of discovery and creation, we are clear on the root causes of the remaining hunger in the world, and we have created strategies to address those root causes that are effective, affordable, replicable and sustainable.

The context for our organizational design during the creation phase was to have a small, lean enterprise that could go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice and pioneer strategies to end the persistence of hunger.

The next phase that has emerged during 2006 is one of building and evolving. At our Board meetings last year, we identified priorities that would be critical in the era of scale-up – none of which were in the domain of fundamental creation, but rather reflective of building and evolving what has been created. During 2006, we committed to:

Significantly expand the scale of our programs, beginning with a demonstration of scale-up (i.e. full coverage) in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
Obtain world-class independent evaluation of the impact of our programs, beginning with a Robertson-funded study in the Eastern Region by Yale, Berkeley and the University of Ghana.
Systematize our methodology so that institutional donors, policy makers and other organizations can truly understand how our strategies work. We did this with our epicenter strategy in 2006, and intend to go through a similar exercise with our programs in South Asia and Latin America this year.
Identify and consistently implement best practices.
Increase our influence with policy makers.

All five of these priorities arise from our intention to have it become undeniable to policy makers that empowerment-based, gender-focused strategies are the only viable alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic approach that has dominated development for the past 50 years. While top-down, service delivery systems have scored successes in areas such as immunization and infrastructure, it has proven far too inflexible and inefficient to deal with the complexities of rural poverty.

Our five priorities apply not only to the scale-up demonstration in Ghana but to all our programs.

Context for Our Organization in the Future

The heart of the transition we need to make is from a lean, pioneering organization to an “evergreen” organization – an organization that is perennially fresh, enduring, powerful, effective and true to its principles. This calls for new and different qualities and responsibilities of leadership.

This is the context for the succession planning that I announced to the Board last December which is now underway. Under the leadership of Steve Sherwood, we have launched a search for the CEO for The Hunger Project in its next phase. This CEO who will have the responsibility to grow our organization from its current size of $15 million per year, to $30 million or more over the next five years while keeping it true to its principles, and build it in a way that it can become a $50 million organization.

Central to being an evergreen organization is to develop a “strong bench” – that is, an expanded team of senior staff who can step into leadership positions in the future. Developing that strong bench will be an important responsibility of the CEO.

Steve Sherwood has assembled a search team that includes George Weiss and myself from our Board; our Board secretary Charles Deull; Barbara Rose, a high-level investor from Chicago who is a leader in women and philanthropy; and Betsy Sanders, a top corporate executive.

Getting the Mic

Also as I announced last year, I plan to devote far more of my energies to influencing policy makers. I observed last year that at a time of increasing world attention to the Millennium Development Goals, “who had the microphone” in the public discourse was predominantly men from the developed world. We didn’t hear from developing world leaders or from women in general. I realized that if I wanted that situation to change, I should look at how I – personally – could get the mic.

We need the policy makers, development experts and the public to understand that gender equality is fundamental to the future of humanity.

While in 2006, I did many more speeches than previously, my assessment now is that the most high-leverage way to shape the public discourse—and to get the attention of policy makers—is to have a powerful, comprehensive book that systematically makes the case that to achieve the end of hunger and abject poverty, we as a global family must confront and transform gender inequality.

I am now writing that book, and have assembled a team to support the research, promotion and distribution of that book.

Program Milestones

Since our October 2006 meeting, we have achieved solid progress in all areas of our programs, as detailed in the attached reports. Some of the key milestones include:

Meeting our first half-year scale-up milestones in the Eastern Region of Ghana, by moving five epicenters into the construction phase and launching our mobilization process in five new districts.
Hiring a new woman country director in Senegal – Madeleine Cisse – who has launched a major drive to consolidate the progress in the country where our epicenter strategy has been underway the longest.
Inaugurating two new women-run, government-recognized banks, one in Uganda and one in Ghana.
Completing our first year of pioneering a new Women Leaders’ Training Program in Bangladesh – providing intensive training to 249 women as resource people in women’s rights in villages across all five regions of the country – and launching a quadrupling of this program in 2007.
Leading India’s first national celebration of International Women’s Day, including having one of our trained women elected representatives speak alongside Sonia Gandhi.
Launching a new, expanded women’s leadership training initiative in Bolivia, building on the opportunities that have emerged as Bolivia’s long-excluded indigenous majority have participated in the creation of Bolivia’s new constitution.
We have held the first animator trainings for two government agencies in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico. Government staff members now work as animators in partnership with the rural people. Based on this success, four more state agencies have requested to be added to the partnership with The Hunger Project.
Putting in place a new internet-based system for monitoring impact of our programs at the village level around the world. Following consultations with some of the world’s leading proponents of empowerment-based development, we are also pioneering new ways to empower “barefoot researchers” – women and men from the poorest segments of the villages where we work who are trained to investigate their own poverty.

Fundraising Milestones

Our approach to targets in fundraising has been to set targets not based on what we know we can achieve, but that will stretch us. It was therefore an outstanding achievement to close 2006 having surpassed our targets in both the US and in our partner countries.

We increased fundraising in the US from $6.9 million in 2005 to $8.4 million in 2006 for 21% growth.
We increased overall fundraising in the partner countries from $3.45 million to $3.9 million, which increased funds from partner countries to global programs from $2.37 in 2005 to $2.8 in 2006 for 18% growth

In the first quarter of 2007, we began the year by hiring a long-time Hunger Project investor, Lee Stuart, to be our new Director of Strategic Investment. Trained as a Ph.D. ecologist at UC-Davis and San Diego State University, Lee has recently completed 21 years of community development leadership for the reconstruction of the South Bronx. Lee’s first mandate is to cause a breakthrough in our institutional funding.

During the first quarter, our fundraising has progressed solidly, closing 13% ahead of our exceedingly strong first quarter last year.

Our highest priority in high-level fundraising is to meet the Robertson Foundation challenge match by securing an additional $1 million per year for the Eastern Region scale-up. On the goal of $1 million for 2007, we already have $874,000 confirmed, most of which is confirmed for all four years of the match. More than $500,000 of these new funds are from four new investors from The Netherlands who went on an investor trip to Burkina Faso last year.

Organizational Milestones

In addition to our program and fundraising results, and building on the success of our first-ever consolidated audit achieved in the first half of 2006, The Hunger Project has once again been given the highest rating – four stars – at Charity Navigator – America’s premier charity evaluator, and the “Wise Giving” seal, indicating that we meet all the standards of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.

Design of Our 30^th Anniversary Gala Celebration

Our annual Gala Celebration, which this year also marks our 30^th anniversary, has the theme: “Ending Hunger: Celebrate the Results.” It will be held in the New York Hilton Grand Ballroom on Saturday night, October 13, with our Board meeting on the following morning. Our goal is not to honor the passage of time, but rather to hear directly from representatives of our leaders in the field who are achieving breakthrough results – most of whom have never before been given a platform at our October event. I look forward to sharing our plans with you in more detail when we are together.

Click here to go to the main Contents page with links
to all April 2007 updates to the Global Board of Directors.