Heifer empowers communities worldwide
For nearly 75 years, Heifer International has been improving the lives of people across the globe with a simple message of empowering communities, the organization’s community engagement manager said last week.
“Our mission is to end hunger and poverty while caring for the earth,” Cindy Sellers Roach said during a presentation to Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club Wednesday at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa.
“It’s pretty simple. Three major points — ending hunger and ending poverty. Those two things go together, also while
caring for the earth. In other words, doing it in a way that’s sustainable for the environment.”
The idea came about in the early 1940s when Dan West, a relief worker from a church in Goshen, Ind., traveled to Spain on mission.
“Part of his work while he was there was reconstituting powdered milk for the families that had been decimated by war,” she said. “Part of that job entailed deciding who got the milk that day because there was only so much milk he could pass out every day, otherwise they would run out. So he had to ration it.
“He had to tell people ‘I’m sorry, you got milk yesterday. You’ll have to go to the back of the line. If you get back up here and I still have some milk, you can have it.’ This broke his heart. He had two children of his own, lived in dairy country in northern Indiana and he kept thinking ‘If I could just go home and get some cows from my friends and give them to these people, they wouldn’t have to come to somebody like me with their cups, and their bowls, and their buckets.’ So that was his idea — not a cup, but a cow.”
When he returned to Indiana, Roach said, the idea quickly took root, but the idea of shipping milk cows proved difficult because cows producing milk need to be milked twice a day. That’s where the heifer comes in.
The Church of the Brethren began sending young female cows that had recently been impregnated overseas with the understanding that when they arrived and gave birth, they would begin producing milk for these families.
“Before they could make all this work, World War II had broken out and then of course in 1941 the United States was pulled into that,” Roach said. “So it was 1944 before they were able to make this vision a reality. In 1944, they sent 17 heifers to Puerto Rico.
“We were the Heifer Project of the Church of the Brethren back in 1944. That’s why we still have the name legally Heifer Project International. … And that’s why I wear a cow everywhere I go.”
Heifer operates under the belief that people have the right to feed themselves and live dignified lives.
“We equip them with the resources to achieve that on their own,” Roach said. “That doesn’t just mean the cows you give for Christmas, or the chickens, or the bees, or the water buffalo, or the guinea pigs, whatever you might give. It also means the education and the training to utilize their small farms to improve their standard of living, not only nutritionally but economically.
“Eighty percent of the developing world is fed by small-scale farmers, so we firmly believe that empowering small-scale farmers to this kind of livelihood is what’s going to end hunger and poverty for the majority of people in the world who are struggling today.”
In recent years, Roach said Heifer International has included in its education of these worldwide communities the concept of a living income.
“That’s something we’re not unfamiliar with in the United States, a living wage, but it is kind of a new concept for many of the farm families and communities that we work with,” she said. “What is a living income for a farmer in Ghana? So we have over the last several years worked with all of our country offices, all of our staffs in those country offices who are part of those countries, not Americans that we’ve sent over, to establish what a living income looks like for our farmers and how they achieve that.
“So, our goal isn’t just to improve their standard of living. Our goal is to get them to a living income. Something that’s sustainable so they can put a roof over their head, food in their bellies, access medical care, send their children to school and have a little bit of resilience built in case something happens. Invariably, something is going to happen — a hurricane, an earthquake, a drought.”
The organization’s theory of change is based on a concept known as “Values Based Holistic Community Development.”
“What that means is basically we go in and work with communities … based on what they have to build on,” Roach said. “What is their foundation and they share values. And we start building on those values. What do family positions look like? What do they value as far as spirituality? So we identify their shared values, what resources they have, and where they want to go. And then we try to identify the gaps between those things and see what kind of training and resources development they need to try to close those gaps.”
Through this development model, Roach said the organization has discovered products of their efforts that aren’t a part of the initial mission.
“They’re not our primary mission, but they help our work be more effective,” she said. “One of those things is women’s empowerment. It might surprise you to learn that most of the small-scale farmers in the world, about 70 percent of the small-scale farmers in the world, are women. That’s surprising because in many of those places women do not own the means of production. They don’t own the livestock, they don’t own the land, but they’re the ones that are working the land and taking care of the livestock because that’s food.
“Food systems in most of the cultures tend to be women’s and children’s work. So when we go down, one of the values we ask them to develop in the community is what does a gender and family focus look like? Who in the family does what part of taking care of the family? What are the roles traditionally in their communities? And then how can we empower all of those roles within the family to do their jobs better, to improve their families.”
The mission of Heifer International has for more than seven decades emphasized the importance of paying it forward. Roach said families who receive livestock from the organization are required to gift products of their labor to others needing that empowerment in order to build sustainability.
“We ask them to identify how they can pass on gifts,” she said, adding that even the first babies of the 17 heifers delivered to Puerto Rico in 1944 were given to others.