| UPDATED JANUARY 2005 |
The Hunger Project has formally been my organizational "home" for 29 years - yet my involvement with the commitment to ending world hunger is much older.
Personal responsibility, community service and stewardship were a gift to me from my parents. My family was very active in the Presbyterian Church, PTA, the YMCA and the Boy Scouts - and this was the environment which shaped my thoughts from pre-school onwards.
I was particularly lucky in being surrounded by adults who treated me and other children as (what seemed to us) adults: a highly intellectual pastor - George Sweazey - a truly great scout master - James F. MacMillan - as well as my parents.
When I was 13, I attended the New York World's Fair as part of the Boy Scout Jamboree. At the GE pavilion, there were robots explaining the history of technology and - at the very end was a display on fusion energy. It was there that I first heard of the possibility of ending world hunger. They asked the question - "did I know that the Sahara desert was intrinsically more fertile than the San Joaquin Valley, if it could be irrigated?" (I certainly did not - but immediately there were images of orange groves across the Sahara.) They then went on to explain that if we had an infinite, clean source of energy like fusion we could desalinate sea water and irrigate the Sahara much as the Moors had done 1000 years ago.
Well - that was it on me. I wrote the IPS and got the kit on how to become a fusion physicist - and then proceeded to do so.
At the same Jamboree, I heard Lyndon Johnson speak. His commitment to a Great Society - and his later persecution of the war in Viet Nam - were also to be important in my life.
The next important step was my participation as a "youth delegate" at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the early spring of 1969 in Chicago. What a tumultuous meeting! We chained the doors to force consideration of a resolution on the war. Delegates who were also members of the Chicago police department defended their actions at the 1968 democratic convention. But of most lasting import to me was meeting professionals in the church who worked in Latin America and were devoted to the interests of the poor. The document they had submitted as church policy was entitled "The Self-Development of People" - a stinging critique of conventional charity and a reflection of the work of Paolo Freire.
The pursuit of physics led me to Stanford University in the fall of 1969. On my first day there, I because active in the anti-war movement; I became one of the chief organizers of my dormitory for all sorts of anti-war demonstrations (the first one, interestingly enough, was against the GE recruiter coming onto campus.)
The war ended. I graduated from Stanford and moved to Berkeley for graduate school. But before I began, I commuted daily to work in the labs at Stanford. There were very few people who did such a "reverse" commute, and there was another physicist who organized a chartered bus for this purpose. What an interesting bunch of people! The organizer of the bus (Bob) was also the head of a community service and civil rights group in Oakland with which I began volunteering.
That same year, the famine in Bangladesh was ending and the world held its first "World Food Conference" in Rome. Henry Kissinger declared that "in 10 years nobody would need to go hungry." I knew this was absurd, but it was the kind of thing the world should be achieving.
By late 1976 or early 1977, I attended an event at which Buckminster Fuller and Werner Erhard spoke of the possibility of "little individuals" affecting global issues - of the dialectic between personal and social progress. On February 15th, I heard that they and others were founding something called "The Hunger Project" with a goal of ending hunger in 20 years. It struck me that this was for me!
I began volunteering for the head of the organization, Joan Holmes, in March. My first "job" was research - I would come to her office in San Francisco on Tuesday nights and speed-read stacks of books and reports, preparing 1-page summaries (a wonderful exercise). I remember coming across the statement buried in the National Academy of Sciences study saying that the worst aspects of hunger and starvation could be ended in 20 years if there was the political will to do so.
The organization was officially launched in August through October at a series of big events - I attended the one at the Cow Palace. It included Dick Gregory, who promoted fasting one day each month - which became part of the program for quite a few years.
November 14, 1977 was our first fast-and-donation day. I went in to help Tracy Apple open the envelopes.
I did very little with the organization other than a few presentations until October 1978 when I moved to Princeton, New Jersey. I joined Nassau Presbyterian Church and quickly became chair of the Princeton Hunger Project Committee and coordinator of the Church World Service CROP Walk.
A few of the many people, in addition to Joan Holmes, who dramatically shaped my thinking during this period included:
From 1978 through 1984 in Princeton, I was involved with volunteer activities including enrollment, fundraising, design and implementation of the Ending Hunger Briefing program, the 1980 expert symposium, and representing The Hunger Project at meetings on international development including the hearings of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger. I also did a computer game in a project with Columbia Teachers College, Save the Children and Lutheran World Relief called "Someone like me."
By late 1984, at the height of the African famine, I decided on a carreer change. At a meeting of The Hunger Project's Board in December, Joseph Kennedy of Africare spoke about the situation in Ethiopia. As he described the refugee camps, it was clear that this was one of the greatest man-made crime since the holocaust. I realized that, as a volunteer, I would never really be as fully involved as I wanted to be, and so I should give up my career and find a job in international development.
At that moment, I expected I would need to go to work for CARE, as the office of The Hunger Project was in San Francisco and I had no desire to move back to California. As the fates would have it, however, in January - at our symposium with the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta - Joan informed me THP was establishing its headquarters in New York. That was it on me!
My first staff job was to establish the office and help form a new coalition - InterAction. I subsequently also became responsible for administering the Africa Prize beginning in 1986, production of videos in 1987, formulation of our new "Strategic Planning in Action" methodology in 1988, launching it in India in 1990, working with Joan to reformulate the organization in 1991 to deliver SPIA and launching THP in Bangladesh in 1992. I was made director of programs and chief of staff in 1990, and officially made Vice President/COO in 1997.