Update Against Hunger - March 7, 2007
Field Notes:
This Space Vacant
Nan Dale, our new Executive Director, is in Africa this month, seeing our
programs firsthand. She’s learning the details of what we do and why we do
it—but not from reports or policy papers. Rather she’s breathing the sweat,
dust, and desperation our teams face every day.
Nan is familiar with such efforts. Her humanitarian work has taken her to
Bosnia, Ghana, Iraq, and Sierra Leone. But our approach with its quarter-century
of proven results is often unique, and Nan is gathering the specifics that will
help her enhance our efforts—especially with donors.
She'll be back soon and will report on what she saw in our next issue.
New from US Headquarter:
Our New Fundraiser Takes Charge
Our new Senior Director of External Affairs, Dagmar Kohring, is now
overseeing our communications and fundraising efforts. Most recently, Dagmar was
V.P. for Institutional Advancement and Communications at the Ms. Foundation for
Women, where in two years she doubled the organization’s endowment. Previously
she was the chief executive officer of International Fund Raising and Management
Consulting, Inc., in Boston and Bonn, Germany. There her clients included
Harvard University School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center in Boston, UNICEF offices in Geneva and Zurich, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
(a political think tank) in Bonn, and the Christian Association of Upper Egypt.
Before that, she served as Senior Fund Counsel at Brakeley, John Price Jones,
Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut and London, where her clients included a variety
of not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. and Europe.
Dagmar was born in Germany, lived for a time as a teenager in Australia, then
completed high school, college, and grad school in Washington, D.C. She launched
her professional fundraising career at Harvard, where she worked first for the
university’s art museums. Later at Harvard, she promoted class solicitations and
initiated donation programs from foreign alumni of the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences.
Currently, Dagmar is in Uganda discovering our programs in person, on a
shorter tour than Nan’s, but similar to it. Dagmar expects to return with
public-relations ammunition that will help us enhance and expand our programs.
We welcome her aboard.
News from the field:
We Organize a Major Conference on Food Security in the Congo
Africa has its own Great Lakes: Albert, Edward, Kivu, Malawi, Tanganyika, and Victoria, located in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The Great Lakes region serves as watershed for the Congo, Nile and Zambezi rivers. And the area is in trouble.
Climate change, deforestation, and local warfare have caused predictable deterioration in agriculture by ravaging farms and displacing farmers. Further, large-scale commercial fishing is depleting the lakes and reducing the catch of individual fishermen. The ecosystem around the Great Lakes is fragile, and while it has been fertile in the past, it’s increasingly less so and is proving slow to renew itself. As a result, food security in the region is threatened.
So our team in Uvira, on Lake Tanganyika in the D.R. Congo, is organizing a major conference in the town, scheduled for the end of March, to discuss the situation. We’re inviting Action Against Hunger’s staff in Burundi along with other humanitarian organizations committed to improving local food security as well as research groups working to identify the causes of increased hunger in the region.
The purpose of the conference is to share insights and to stimulate cooperation in reversing the ecological decline. The sooner the problems are identified and solutions are found, the sooner we’ll be able to return the Lakes area to its former Greatness.
Person Profile:
Profile—Jeanette Bailey
Jeanette Bailey’s career has caromed in and out of Action Against Hunger. Born in Fairfax, Virginia, but raised all over the United States as her father’s career in the pharmaceutical industry was shaped by a series of corporate mergers, Jeanette eventually studied international relations and philosophy at Tufts. Influenced by the two disciplines, Jeanette realized that all efforts at establishing human rights and justice means little in communities where hunger rules. So when she discovered Action Against Hunger at a career fair on campus, she filed us away in her memory for future reference.
Jeanette’s first humanitarian work was for a small organization in Panama that fostered sustainable development. She spent a summer learning the ropes and helping evolve a curriculum. The organization offered her a yearlong position that would begin after a two-month hiatus. Because she was interested in Action Against Hunger, she contacted us to fill those months. Fortuitously, we needed an intern for two months to help in operations, and Jeanette joined our team.
Then she went back to Panama to continue developing the organization’s curriculum. When Jeanette returned to the states, she dropped by our headquarters to say hello. As it happened, our operations team needed an intern to help write a grant proposal for a project in Uganda, and Jeanette jumped at the opportunity. We sent her to Uganda twice, and her work on the proposal helped land the project. Meanwhile, she also became our office manager.
But then Jeanette won a Fulbright that took her to Bolivia where, partnered with Save the Children, she studied the long-term impact of short-term humanitarian aid—which, expectedly, she found to produce both helpful effects and problematic ones.
At the end of January, Jeanette of course stopped in our offices to say hello—and we convinced her with little difficulty to travel for us to Tajikistan to survey the impact of our breastfeeding promotion program there.
In the fall, Jeanette will attend the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “After my master’s in a year,” she says, “I’ll probably be back at Action Against Hunger.“ Long-term she thinks she might like to become a doctor though she fears she may have waited too long to begin her studies. Meantime, however, her field work for us, she says, is keeping her fascinated and excited.
