Update Against Hunger - January 3, 2007
Field Notes:
Nan Dale Will Be Our New Chief Executive Officer
Action Against Hunger’s Board of Directors has named Nan Dale as our new Chief Executive Officer. She’ll take over at our headquarters mid-January.
Most recently, Nan served as President and CEO of Helen Keller International, an agency devoted to the prevention of malnutrition and the elimination of preventable blindness around the world. Before that, she served for 22 years as the President and CEO of The Children’s Village, a multi-service agency for children, adolescents, and families. She also created and ran the Children’s Village Institute, initiated to bridge the gap between practitioners, academics, and policy makers. During her tenure at The Children’s Village, she brought the agency from a fledgling organization with an annual budget of $3 million to a multi-service $43 million agency.
Nan’s international work began when she took a leave of absence from The Children’s Village in 1993 to aid the victims of ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. She developed The Croatia Project to improve the conditions in refugee camps, develop schools and psycho-social supports, and train local personnel and NGO staff members in post-traumatic stress syndrome and conflict-resolution work with adolescents. Her other international projects have included assisting Doctors of the World in Sierra Leone to assess the efficacy of providing support services to victims of the war who were testifying before the world court; working with the American Friends Service Committee in Iraq in 1999 to assess the effect of the United Nations Sanctions on maternal and child health; and implementing programs to bring troubled youth in New York to Ghana to install computers in local schools.
All of us at the New York headquarters welcome the fresh energy and experience Nan will bring to our operation.
David Blanc
Program Director,
Action Against Hunger
New from US Headquarter:
College Musicians Against Hunger
With increasing frequency, students around the country are helping us spread the word about our work. On December 6, for example, six young musicians from Hofstra University in Hemptstead, Long Island, staged a concert to benefit Action Against Hunger and raise awareness regarding global hunger. The concert, hosted by the Hofstra University Music & Entertainment Industry Student Association (HUMEISA), featured an eclectic group of performers whose styles ranged from folk to pop rock. Nate Cyphert, a senior at Hofstra and the principal organizer of the event, learned about Action Against Hunger through the One Campaign, one of our partners in the fight to end global hunger.
During the concert, Luis Irene, president of HUMEISA, delivered some eye-opening facts about world hunger and Action Against Hunger's lifesaving work. Jacob Vanags, one of the performers, was particularly disturbed by the statistics. "It's really shocking that someone dies every four seconds from hunger," he said.
Many of the songs performed during the evening were included in a CD recorded in Hofstra’s Studio. All proceeds from sales of the CD during the event went to support our work.
News from the field:
Our Latest Project in Pakistan
The earthquake of October 2005 devastated parts of Pakistan, but it left the Manoor Valley less seriously damaged than other areas in the Himalayas. Even so, the Valley is a high-altitude area prone to chronic food shortages during winters, and now the situation is worse because of high market prices related to the quake. Infrastructure has also been damaged—including secondary roads, footpaths, irrigation channels, check dams, field terraces, and retaining walls—and livelihood options are few.
Because forecasts predict an early winter and heavy snows, because damaged roads have led to further food shortages and increases in food prices that worsen inflated post-earthquake levels, and because food stocks are low due to reduced agricultural productivity and loss of other livelihoods caused by the earthquake, Action Against Hunger has launched a short-term Food for Work program. This project aims to encourage the rapid rehabilitation of vital community infrastructure and to provide workers with food that can be stored for the winter.
Local beneficiaries employed by the program are rebuilding footpaths and secondary roads, irrigation channels, and field terraces. Community-based organizations are helping to prioritize and organize the projects, recruit workers, and monitor each project’s progress. The rehabilitated roads and footpaths will significantly improve access to the valley’s villages over the course of the winter, and rehabilitated irrigation canals will increase access to water and enhance agricultural productivity.
The project will employ nearly 1,300 workers and benefit nearly 8,000 villagers.
Person Profile:
Profile—Clemens Von Heimendahl
Clemens von Heimendahl was born in Köln, Germany. He grew up not only in Germany but also in Canada and the United States where his father taught physics at universities including the University of California at Berkeley. Clemens studied journalism in college and went to work in public relations for the German government’s water bureaucracy.
After he had learned the intricacies of official bureaucracies, Clemens worked as a lobbyist for several corporations as well as for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and for the government of Turkey, which was eager to join the European Community. These jobs led to promoting international development and writing grant applications for several small non-governmental organizations in Germany and Mexico. Then he went to work for the Red Cross, where among other assignments he was named Country Director for Sudan. He expanded the organization’s mission there from three people to 17 “delegates” and 390 local employees.
This past summer, Clemens’s wife, who works for Germany’s foreign service, was posted to Islamabad in Pakistan, and Clemens asked the Red Cross to send him there as well. When they couldn’t do so, he searched for a position with another humanitarian organization. He had come to know Action Against Hunger while in Sudan, and as it happened, we needed a Country Director to be based in Islamabad. So Clemens joined our team.
Our current project in Pakistan was launched in response to 2005’s earthquake, but Clemens says there are pockets of severe malnutrition unrelated to the quake throughout the country. So he’s focusing in particular on raising our profile within Pakistan—he recently hired a communications officer—and on raising funds to expand our efforts there.
His wife’s commitment in Islamabad lasts another four years, so Clemens intends to stay there as well. After that, he expects to remain in humanitarian work. “Everywhere we go, we see the results of our efforts and why we’re doing it,” he says. “I love my job.”
