January 2012 Enewsletter

Dear ,

Here’s the story you may know: Heifer’s founder Dan West, while ladling out cups of milk to hungry people during the Spanish Civil War, thought to himself that the families need “not a cup, but a cow.”

 

The story you may not know: Heifer has vowed to scale up its program impact as its number one priority. Using the same family-oriented, community-based development model, we will help our smallholder famers move from providing for themselves to help feeding the world.

 

Smallholder farming families grow 70% of the food the world eats every day. Their health, their productivity, their care for the soil and the environment around them is simply critical to our future.

 

It is believed that we will need to double food production over the next two to three decades. The Heifer model works – it’s proven successful for nearly 70 years – so we need to reach more farming families as rapidly as possible. We need to act now.

 

This new Heifer pushes the limits of our imagination. We are committed to use the ingenuity of the people with whom we work to define a new standard. We’re inspired by people like Nisha Pariyar, whose government job sewing clothes never made ends meet and provided very little hope. Two short years later, Nisha's future is much brighter after receiving goats from Heifer. Nisha looks at her daughter now and says, “The sky is the limit for her.”

We are still driven by the same mission; we still have the same finely-honed, well researched, impactful agricultural development model. Now we are going to push it to the next level. Never before have we aimed so high. We are challenging ourselves because the global situation demands it.

As you read this month’s newsletter, look with us to the future. As we continue on this journey of change, we need your help! Donors like you have made our work possible for nearly 70 years; we’ll need you for this next step as well.  Every one of us has a role to play in the struggle against hunger and poverty.

Here’s to a new, exciting year,

Pierre U. Ferrari
President and CEO
Heifer International