history of meals for millions, soy, and freedom from ... - SoyInfo Center

SoyaScan Notes. Jan. 9. Conducted by William Shurtleff of
Soyinfo Center.
• Summary: Chris started work with Meals for Millions /
Freedom from Hunger (FFH) Foundation on 7 Jan. 1982–29
years and 2 days ago. The organization now has 42
employees. Christopher Dunford, PhD became president of
FFH on 1 Feb. 1991 and he is still president to this day, but
as of 1 July 2011 he will be stepping away from that
position. The plan is for him to remain on staff so he will be
available as a mentor and senior research fellow for the
following two years, working on Research and Evaluation,
writing “lessons learned” over the 20+ years of integrated
microfinance services, and creating a learning environment
in the cross-section between microfinance and health. Of
course, this is dependent on the new CEO and whether that
plan is suitable to him/her. He has had, by far, the longest
term as president in the history of the organization.
In recent years he has “stuck to his guns” in making
sure the microfinance community does not move away from
reaching the poorest of the poor. In about the year 2000
there was a big movement in the lending community called
“commercialization” or “going upscale.” Every banker
knows that it is easier to loan money to people who already
have a fair amount of it than it is to people who are in need
of it. At this time even microfinance was starting to move in
this direction, leaving the poor behind–one more time. So
Freedom from Hunger (along with Sam Daley-Harris of
Microcredit Summit Campaign {Washington, DC}) became
a voice of opposition to movement in this direction. The
Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus in
Bangladesh, was not as vocal as FFH, but they were
definitely staying with their original ideals and cheering
FFH. Eventually (in about 2002) the U.S. Congress passed a
law stating that 50% of all funding from USAID for
microfinance has to go the poorest of the poor. At that point
the question arose: How do we measure poverty? So FFH’s
evaluation team (headed by Christopher Dunford) started to
get involved in actual poverty measurement tools.
In the early 1990s, when FFH started its program of
Credit with Education, which made small loans to poor
women and provided valuable information with the loans,
Christopher Dunford realized that it would be essential to
measure the results of the new program to see if it was
working, and if it was working better than money alone–
without the innovation of education. He said, “We need to
prove that its working” and to measure the impact. Its all
about food security, plus the health and nutrition of the
mothers and the children. FFH has always worked only in
rural villages with very poor people.
Question: During the almost three decades that Chris
has worked for FFH, what have been the most important
developments in this organization?
CD: By far the most important change was the move
from the Applied Nutrition Program over to microfinance.
MEALS FOR MILLIONS, SOY, AND FREEDOM FROM HUNGER 170
© Copyright Soyinfo Center 2011
The Applied Nutrition Program was effective for the people
that FFH was reaching, but the evaluations were showing
that the impact was very limited, and it was very labor
intensive and very expensive–with things such as weighing
babies several times a year. David Crowley, who as
president of FFH just before Dunford, made the decision to
make this major change. But the decision was forced by a
set of layoffs in 1988 due to a funding downturn. Of the 29
people on staff, nine were laid off–a third of the staff. He
made the decision to lay off the Applied Nutrition Program
staff. Shortly before this, one of the staff had gone to see the
Grameen Bank in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Kathleen Stack (who
is now vice-president) spent about a week in Bangladesh–
which was really the right way to do it. When she came
back she said, “This is really great. But how can we make
the change from a hunger and nutrition organization to a
new type of bank?” It so happened that she and Dunford
and Ellen Vor der Bruegge (who was a public health
specialist, newly hired at FFH) went together on a trip to
Nepal. The FFH program village in Nepal was an 8-hour
hike from where the car dropped them off. They had a
guide, had to ford streams, etc. The whole time they were
trekking, they were talking about the Grameen Bank and
how FFH could suddenly transform itself into being a new
type of organization. On the trek they came up with a
completely new idea: “Why don’t we use the money as the
locomotive and the education topics will be the cars in the
train.” This was the origin (worldwide) of the innovation of
linking microfinance with health and nutrition education.
Later business education was added to the program. So this
trip to Nepal turned out to be the turning point. FFH began
to make the transformation slowly, starting microfinance in
only two countries–Mali (in Dec. 1988) and Thailand (July
1989)–with only 50 women in two countries. Why didn’t
other microfinance organizations think of this excellent idea
before? First, microfinance / microcredit / microlending was
still a relatively new idea. And also, adding the education
component made the process much more complicated and
expensive–but it turned out to pay for itself many times
over. The typical person going to the village to make or
collect loans had a financial background. It became
necessary to teach that person health and nutrition topics
and train them to communicate those basic ideas (such as
“mosquitoes carry malaria”) to usually illiterate village
women in a way that they would “get it.” This adds many
new layers to the process. For the first ten years, FFH grew
the Credit with Education program very slowly as they
worked to understand the root causes of chronic hunger,
malnutrition and poverty, and the learned the best ways to
address these–including adult learning techniques, using
pictures, games, discussions, demonstrations, etc. Many
different things go into the education topics. By 1999 (ten
years later) FFH was still reaching only 121,316 women.
But over the next ten years, by Dec. 2008, the number of