Update Against Hunger - July 5, 2006
Field Notes:
Our Annual Look in the Mirror
Dear Action Against Hunger Team Member,
Once a year, all our Country Directors gather for three days of intense meetings to evaluate and discuss improvements to our programs. This year's meeting was held recently on Ile de Ré, France. There we discussed, among other topics, our technical priorities over the next five years, the expansion of home treatment programs for severe malnutrition, and our advocacy efforts, along with the annual scrutiny of our programs. For an example of one program that we examined and plan to expand, see our News from Outside the U.S. below.
I can't report radical breakthroughs at our recent sessions, but I believe the refinements we considered will enhance our efficacy. That's the usual significance of our annual exercise. We're never content with business as usual. We keep working to be better at what we do. Our yearly self-examination keeps us at the forefront of aid organizations.
Cathy Skoula
Executive Director,
Action Against Hunger (ACF)
New from US Headquarter:
Internet Search Against Hunger
Hooked on Google? Instead, from this day forward, when you make an Internet search, please go to http://www.goodsearch.com GoodSearch is an Internet search engine that donates 50% of its advertising revenue to nonprofits selected by the searchers themselves. The roster of potential recipients now includes us. The specific engine used is Yahoo, so you know that its range is exhaustive and well established. (Plus you can always check Google afterward in the unlikely event that you don't find what you want.)
Earning cash for Action Against Hunger through GoodSearch requires only that you identify that you wish to support us on GoodSearch's homepage when you log in. Then when you search the web, we'll collect a piece of GoodSearch's advertising income. GoodSearch estimates that it collects about a penny per search from its advertisers and figures that if 10,000 Action Against Hunger's supporters were to use GoodSearch twice every day, we'd collect more than $70,000 a year.
Here's the drill:
How simple is that?
News from the field:
Distributing Cash, Not Food
Knowledgeable observers have recently criticized the distribution of free food to communities in distress. Doing so, critics say, makes beneficiaries dependent on humanitarian handouts and lowers the market price of food in a community, which in turn hurts local farmers and reduces the community's cash flow.
Distributing cash to beneficiaries, however, might solve many of these problems. (Cash can be given outright to target beneficiaries; it can be paid as salaries for work programs created by aid organizations; or it can be distributed in the form of vouchers that define the goods for which the vouchers can be exchanged.) Assuming a community has food available locally, cash handouts flow back and forth among the residents when they shop, stimulating the local economy while empowering spenders who choose which foods to buy and in what quantities. Alternatively, beneficiaries may decide to spend their cash on seeds or tools to enhance their ability to support themselves. Equally important, aid organizations find that bringing cash into a community is a lot cheaper and easier than importing tons of rice and flour.
The ease with which cash can be divertedto bribe corrupt officials, say, or to buy luxuries, drugs, or weaponsis little different from food distributions, which can be bartered for the same purposes. In general, cash handouts are harmful only when a community lacks sufficient marketable resources. In that case, cash distributions can cause price inflation. Consequently, before cash distributions are made, aid organizations need to assess whether local markets can absorb the largess. To date, Action Against Hunger has instituted cash-for-work programs in such countries as Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Somalia, and launched a voucher program in Myanmar. Results, as presented at our recent gathering of Country Directors, have been encouraging, and we expect to duplicate such programs elsewhere.
Person Profile:
Profile McKenna Morrigan
Back from Darfurand Ready for More
A native of Eugene, Oregon, McKenna Morrigan, our new development and communications coordinator in New York, prefers low-gear life on the West Coast to overdrive life in the East. "But the work that I want to do is in New York," she says, so for the foreseeable future you'll find her in our offices, telling our story and soliciting donations.
McKenna has worked at relieving hunger since high school when she volunteered at a local soup kitchen and food bank. When she went off to college at Brown, she became involved with a student chapter of Oxfam, where she helped raise awareness and funds while also serving as an intern in the organization's leadership development program. At the same time, she helped launch a campus food concession that sold fair trade products, and she served two years as president of the Oxfam chapter.
Meanwhile, McKenna majored in cultural anthropology, with a focus on development in East Asia. She also learned Mandarin Chinese. As an undergraduate, she traveled to China on a study-abroad program, though her program was aborted during the SARS epidemic. After graduating, she worked for a time in Rhode Island at an HIV clinic, then returned to China to teach English at a private boarding school. While in China, McKenna continued her involvement with hunger relief, working with Heifer International, an aid organization that provides livestock to struggling farm families to help them become self-supporting.
In February, McKenna left China for New York, looking for humanitarian work to relieve hunger and we were a perfect fit. Unlike most members of our team, however, she's not secretly itching to be sent into the field. "Working with Oxfam," she says, "I realized how powerful outreach and communication are. And that's the work I want to do."
