HOW IMPORTANT IS A WORLD WITHOUT HUNGER TO YOU?

In 1990, we pioneered a new decentralized, holistic, people-centered approach known as “Strategic Planning in Action” (SPIA). More than 20,000 villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America applied SPIA to achieve lasting improvements in health, education, nutrition and family income.

We continued to recognize the vital importance of women’s empowerment in the following years and implemented several gender-focused interventions, including an initiative in 2000 that has now provided leadership training to about 175,000 elected women – as well as a campaign around the “AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop” in Africa, which has trained over a million people.

One of the major priorities in the first year of The Hunger Project was to create a volunteer network across the US, to enroll individuals in the commitment to end hunger – this is our original pledge card that we handed out on the streets to rally compassionate people like you!

Our Vision, Commitment and Action (VCA) Workshops were first developed in 1993 in Bangladesh. This intensive, transformative workshop is now a fundamental element used across our program countries to mobilize communities for self-reliant actions. Since 2008, 1.7 million people have participated in VCA Workshops around the world.

In 2005, the UN held a special conference to review the progress of the world’s Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), and concluded in the Millennium Project that achieving them would require scaling-up projects that already worked. Projects like our successful Epicenter Strategy – a bottom-up, gender-focused, integrated strategy for rural development in Africa. We took charge – applying this program on a national scale, and as of 2019, 35 epicenters comprising 560,000 people, have declared self-reliance!

We quickly got to work to unite the international development community, too. From 1977-89, The Hunger Project carried out the world’s largest public education and advocacy campaign on the issue of hunger and played a catalytic role in mobilizing international support to stop famines in Cambodia (1979), Somalia (1980) and the entire African continent (1983-85).

In the photograph above, late actor and long-time activist of The Hunger Project, Valerie Harper, visits Somalia with our staff and volunteers (center row, second to the right). It’s an honor to count Valerie among the first enrolled in our work.

By the late 90s, it was clear more had to be done to address the subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment of women. This image was taken at a historic meeting in Jaipur in 1998, where we united with nine of the most influential women leaders to identify new strategic actions around these issues.