A Conversation with Heifer International on Climate Change, Agriculture and Nonprofit Management

Posted on 16 February 2010

By Rahim Kanani

The Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations hosted alumna Jo Luck HKSEE 1979, President of Heifer International, and her senior leadership team, at an event on February 4^th where they engaged with students and faculty on issues ranging from climate change, to agriculture, to nonprofit management.

Heifer International, which is dedicated to relieving global hunger and poverty through livestock and training, aims to empower communities by giving families a hand-up, and not just a hand-out. With special attention paid to gender, Heifer primarily focuses on women, who produce 70 percent of the food in the third world. Accompanying Luck was Vice President of Advocacy Constance Neely; Director of Gender Equity Advocacy Martha Hirpa; and Senior Director of Heifer Village Jim Rollings.

The group discussed the evolution of Heifer International and the scaling up of their impact, moving from a replication and growth model to impact through policy change.

“Until you affect the decision-makers of the world, you’re not going to make a significant difference, thus you must engage in advocacy,” emphasized Luck. “We don’t have the privilege of burying our heads in the sand. We know things that work, and it’s our responsibility to share that, and that’s why we’re pushing for more formalized advocacy. Our interest is to affect those decision-makers and to educate them with the realization that you can’t show results in a year, not in education nor in development.”

In a strategic set of partnerships formed at the Clinton Global Initiative last fall, Heifer is ramping up its analytic capabilities and harnessing the programs it already operates around the world to capture the wealth of knowledge within these systems.  In a global nonprofit such as Heifer International, Luck said balancing advocacy, fundraising and staying true to your core principles is no easy task.

“When you take a stand on an issue, you sometimes lose donors, but we’re about our mission and we’re not donor-driven,” she said.

A number of other issues were discussed by the group, including Heifer International’s response to a report issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2006 titled Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Neely argued that the report failed to disaggregate data among different kinds of livestock in different parts of the world, and thus mischaracterizes the livestock industry at large as one damaging to the environment.  According to the FAO, livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.  The report also noted that the livestock sector’s potential contribution to solving environmental problems is equally large. 

With climate change in mind, and given that Heifer International’s entire enterprise is designed around the use of livestock and the donation of offspring from one family to another, such analysis requires a closer look.

“Agriculture is going to be one of the keys in both mitigation and adaption to the effects of climate change, and farmers and livestock keepers are going to help us lead the way towards solutions,” said Neely. “We’ve got a fight on our hands, and we really have to help people understand the benefits of agriculture.”

Responding to the FAO report, Heifer International, in collaboration with farmers and researchers, carried out a study on farming systems that combine livestock, agriculture, and better grazing practices. In a report issued in 2009, they identified farming systems that contributed to enhanced livelihoods and productivity, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and adaptation capacity.  Indeed, studies showed that such practices produced a net sequestration of carbon. 

When discussions moved to leadership and growth, Luck had no shortage of insight to share.  Her advice to nonprofit leaders and the watchdogs who measure their performance centered around two themes: risk and impact. Joining Heifer International with a budget of $7 million some 20 years ago, Luck transformed the organization to one with a budget of $130 million, although that has slightly declined as a consequence of the economic crisis.

According to Luck, one of the keys to the organization’s success was the way in which, in the early years, they reinvested monies raised from fundraising efforts back into fundraising itself, rather than into programmatic efforts. Understanding development as a process, Luck recognized that the organization’s local capacities needed to be built in order to successfully absorb a large injection of funding, and therefore decided to continue raising capital while local programs developed enough to effectively use more resources. With regard to measuring impact, Luck was eager to see watchdogs understand how to evaluate true impact, rather than use measures like overhead ratios as proxies for efficiency.

Rahim Kanani is a Research Associate at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University and a graduate student in religion, ethics and politics at Harvard Divinity School.