Good Life Project - From Club Kid to CEO and World Hunger Activist

Episode Date: March 21, 2016

This week, our in-depth conversation features Cathy Burke, speaker, author, and global change maker has served as CEO of The Hunger Project Australia for nearly two decades, and has traveled extensively across the villages of Africa and South Asia in her work of ending hunger.Cathy has been profoundly changed by what she has experienced. The women and men she has met have given her the most enduring lessons in life and leadership, resilience and the power of the human will.She is the author of the book, Unlikely Leaders: Lessons in leadership from the village classroom, These stories are captivating and moving, providing a roadmap for personal and social change.In This Episode, You'll Learn:How Cathy awakened to both the truth of world hunger and her role in helping to end itWhat her first trip to Ethiopia taught her that she (and her group) never saw comingHow harnessing the power of women to lead is the ultimate catalystHow her work has forever changed herMentioned in This Episode:The Hunger Project Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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from that non-literate woman food farmer in an Indian village. She's got what it takes to show us what it really means in terms of what's possible. Today's guest, Kathy Burke, grew up in Perth, Australia, kind of a regular kid, went to uni, loved music, loved to go out, party and dance, listen to Indian punk rock. And then a series of things happened that exposed her to the world of activism, got her involved in politics, and eventually led her to be exposed to global hunger. What she learned was it was this massive, massive problem, billion people hungry around the world. And at

first, it just seemed too overwhelming, as it does for many of us who are exposed to things like that. But she eventually circled back and began to participate in an organization, The Hunger Project, that she then eventually volunteered for and ended up heading up as the CEO in Australia and has spent now two and a half decades of service traveling around the world, helping to build a global almost army of volunteers, more than 400,000 people on the ground in different countries, some of the toughest places on earth in this quest to do profound work. We go into this journey, what she's seen, some of the stories, and her relentless focus on possibility and developing people and telling a story and joining with a whole

lot of other people in countries to end global hunger by 2030. Really excited to share her story and her lens on the world. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. There are a lot of different places I want to explore with you. So you're from Perth, which is maybe the only major city I've actually never been to in Australia. Have you been to Australia? I have.

Tell me a little bit about Perth. It's the most isolated city in the world. So it's like 2,500 k's from the nearest capital city. So it's pretty deserted. It's on the coast. It's, I don't know, like it's a really, it's the capital city of a really large state. It sort of fits like about two or three techs in Texas in that state. Pretty, I don't know, it's dry, it's sandy, it's desert. Yeah.

I mean, it's funny. It's what, I think a lot of people. People like make fun of it. So Sydney and Melbourne, they just think... So it's called East Coast West. Well, I guess you've got that here, but people think it's so far away. But really good music's come out of Perth. Right, which was your thing when you were a kid. Yeah, it was. And still is, actually. And great thinking. So the Greens Party really took hold there early, and we had our first senator for nuclear disarmament in the whole country.

And so even though it's quite conservative, then it's got this sort of quite polarising. So you get a lot of good stuff coming out of there. I mean, I haven't lived there for nearly 20 years. But actually, do you know Byron Bay? Yeah, so I now live in the Byron hinterland. So it's 100 acres. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Yeah. I went, it's funny, I have the one actual memory I have of Byron Bay is, you know, as I was traveling down the coast, I was trying to find spots to dive. And when I hit Byron Bay, it was supposed to be a great diving location, but they had shut down diving in the entire area because a couple of bodies had turned up shark-bitten. Yeah, that's right. And I don't know if this is true, but the story I was told was that years ago, there was one of the largest meat processing plants in Australia there, and there was sort of a trained behavior in a lot of the sharks

that that's where you go to feed. Yeah, and it was whale. They did like whale stuff there as well. Is that what it was? Yeah. We've had like about, I think it's like 15 shark attacks in the past sort of two years on that. Only one in Byron, but that little coast of like 50 k's,

30 k's, 20 k's south of Byron byron just along there it's just been this like mecca and it's really awful actually because we're all coastal dwellers and i'm definitely a coastal dweller and you're in the ocean now like you're sort of thinking i've got more of a chance to die of a car accident getting here but you're out there swimming right and everyone's sort of looking at each other and I hope you go. Hope it's not going to be me. All altruism goes out the door. It's like I can run faster than that person and that person. I think we swim out.

So, yeah, that's a bit sad. So but you grew up on the West Coast and you mentioned also and you were in the music scene and you mentioned the Greener Party. You were pretty instrumental in sort of that becoming something. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, I went to uni in Perth and I had absolutely no social conscience or anything at that time. So I wasn't involved in student councils and just I was incredibly vain

and superficial and loved music. So I just lived for socialising basically. So it was pretty typical for my age. And then when I left university, I kicked around a bit and then came in contact with people who were, it was like sort of in the mid to late 80s and it was the start of the sort of like the peace movements and stuff at that time. And the only reason I actually went to any of their meetings, because I said I wasn't interested, is that I was in love with this guy who was older than me and he started to think about

giving back and, you know, being involved in something bigger. And I thought, God, that's just so lame. And I was so insecure that I started to go to these meetings just to make sure the hippies weren't getting into him because he was really handsome. And then I started listening actually to what they were saying and I thought, you know, it really struck me around the whole nuclear issue and social justice and that kind of thing. Anyway, he and I, we broke up but then I got really involved

in that whole sort of movement. And in 1987, we had a federal election campaign and I was in my early 20s and we'd had a senator for nuclear disarmament who had been elected in 1984, and she asked me to help run the campaign and be involved in that, and I had gone back to grad school at that time, and so I did that. It was amazing. She got elected, even though no one thought that she would, and then during that time I ended up joining her staff,

and there's about six or seven of us created the Greens Party. And then she then moved across to being a Green senator. So you literally created a political party? Well, there was seven of us, six or seven of us involved. And it had already started in Tasmania, which is one of our states. And we had a very charismatic Green senator, Bob Brown, that just got elected, but we moved her over, and now there's a really, really big Greens presence in WA,

which is my state, which is really cool. I mean, it's kind of amazing that you go from being a place of relative indifference to this place of just devout public service. Yeah, I know. And it sounds like it was really that one moment where you just kind of like were exposed to an event, an occasion that flipped the switch in some way. Yeah.

I'm a good tale for lots of parents have come up to me and said, I'm really worried about my kid. You know, they're da-da-da-da-da. And I'm thinking, that's just normal. And I tell them my story and they feel like this brimming sense of hope. So, yeah, I think it was just being exposed to, I think once you really have, you listen to something, whereas I'd sort of tuned out listening. So when I actually then focused, it really spoke to my being.

And I just didn't want to not do anything, basically. So you become politically involved and help out with the Greens Party and then become involved in the campaign and then much more substantial and then also find love and become a mom. Still in love, actually, which is really awesome. And it seems like you, at least from what I know of your story, you kind of pulled back to a certain extent and focused really a lot on family life. And then there was a moment, I guess it was in 92, or I guess you got involved first in the Hunger Project before that. So, yeah, Joe, the senator, told me about the hunger project when I was working with her and I remember

just thinking ending hunger you have to be kidding me it just felt so overwhelming and I just thought there's no way and everything and so then I had my first child and I was working we've got a we had some businesses I was working in that and then when yeah when I had my daughter I it's just so personal it was personal for me anyway and a friend who was also involved then talked to me about getting involved just in a small way because I was just you know I wasn't working full time. And, yeah, just holding my own baby in my arms and feeling that connection to women across the world, I just thought, yeah, I had to do something. I'm one of those people who when you're...

It got personal. It got personal. And so then we sort of got involved, but just really in a small way. And then I had a chance to go to Ethiopia in 1992. And that was really the turning point for my life as a, I guess, a public servant and as a human being. So tell me about that trip a little bit. Well, it was a leadership trip to Ethiopia. And the Hunger Project actually wasn't working there

at that point of time. So we were there to help launch the Africa Prize for Leadership for the Sustainable End of Hunger. So there was about six of us or ten of us there and we had a chance to go out into the villages and it wasn't that long after the live aid, you know, the whole famine thing. Right.

So this was, I mean, if you're listening, you know, there was a time, I guess it was the 80s-ish. Yeah, it was like the mid-80s. Where there was this just horrific, horrific famine that was decimating the country. And for a while, it got, it was all, I don't know about Australia, but here it was the lead story in the news for a solid chunk of time. And then it kind of vanished off of the public's, you know, it was kind of like people moved on to the next thing. Yeah, yeah, it was really, I mean, it was a devastating, devastating famine. So when I was there, it wasn't in famine anymore, but the repercussions was still there.

It was only like seven years, six years after it had happened. And so we're driving, we're in this little rickety four-wheel drive and we're driving out to villages out from Addis Ababa. And in fact, even getting there, we were driving through parts of the Rift Valley and the driver said, we're going through the Valley of Death. And I said, oh, what's that? And he said that there were so many people on the move,

millions of people on the move looking for water and food during that time that they'd walked into this valley and 100,000 had died, many women and children, because they couldn't walk out. They couldn't walk back up the hill. And so we're driving through that and that was unbelievably sobering and so then we end up in this little village and it's just people who haven't been to a village it's just was just a collection of huts and it's the grass huts that you see with the thatched roofs and you could see um they're like crops growing but they was pointed out to us that instead of them being really high

at that time of year they were only like a foot tall and they were really sort of thin. And I got out of the car and I just felt so just like an alien visiting another world and I felt really super awkward being there. I didn't feel connected to anything and people met us and the women, the kids looked sick and the women were trying to breastfeed their babies. You could see there wasn't any milk.

And they were just standing there sort of, we were talking through interpreters and sort of just they were being very normal and sort of dignified. And you'd never been in anything remotely like this? Yeah, and I was like still in my mid to late 20s. And so I walked around and we had a woman leading the trip called Lynn Twist, who's this fabulous woman leader still in the world today. And I could see her ducking into little huts to talk to people and she'd hold babies and she was really connecting with people and yet I felt it was just shocking. And I walked around this hut at one point.

I nearly tripped over this man and lying on the ground and I was told that he was willing himself to die, to not be a burden on the community. And I was like full of self-judgment and criticism, thinking what am I doing here and, you know, just totally judging myself. I had my sunnies on, black sunglasses on, just to try and keep my shit together. And then the tribal chief sort of pulled us all together and welcomed us to his village.

And Lynn said that we're from the Hunger Project and we're not here to give aid or food. We're here to understand the issue and to meet you and then to go out into the world because that commitment is to end hunger and i remember at the time just so full of like judgment like oh that's just like really critical of her i was completely in my head right um well i mean what was it i was thinking that's so inadequate and like we should be giving them food yeah or just yeah like just it was just I was just critical of the whole

and the whole thing was just so messed up. And the thing that was so confronting too, Jonathan, it's not like this is like a random single village where this stuff's going down, particularly at that time. There was more than a billion people living like that. It was so confronting to be there and be bearing witness to something that very few of us do. And it isn't a famine scenario because out of everyone

that dies of hunger and poverty, 8% die in a famine, acute emergency situation. The vast majority die of chronic persistent hunger, which is this day-in, day-out malnutrition that grinds you down. It's kids dying of diarrhoea. It's one woman per minute dying of childbirth. It's that kind of stuff. And that's what I was really upfront and personal in,

and I couldn't just sort of pretend this was just this sort of fluky thing. So it was very confronting from a human being perspective that this is happening on our planet planet and it was just so unacceptable. Anyway, so I'm sitting there, standing there with Sethi and Lynn and thinking, God, this is just so inadequate what she's saying. And the tribal chief said to us, he really welcomed us, and he said, we don't want any food or aid anyway. So thank you, but we don't want anything.

He said, if our living and dying means that others don't have to live and die like us, then our lives will be worth it. And I just could not, and everyone was just standing there, I couldn't, I can't, even to this day, I can't imagine the sense of awareness and legacy that you would say that about your own life, that if making it worth for, you know, generations to come. So we got, I can't remember anything else that happened, and we got into a little, into our things, and we went back

to this little shed that we were all staying in. There was this mattress on the floor and everyone got like totally upset and just we had biscuits in the car and we had blankets. We didn't do anything. We just talked and it was just, you know. And Lynn said the thing that changed my direction in my life. She said, well, they said that they don't want anything anyway and you would only give something to trick yourself into thinking

that you've made a difference today. You would only have given that to make you feel better, to somehow assuage what you've seen and I won't let you do that. The thing to do is to keep your promise to these people and go out into the world and be a voice and help bring about the end of hunger. And that was my thing. So I went back to Perth.

Did that make sense to you at the time? Totally made sense to me. But at the same time, like I can't imagine being, as much as you're like, okay, I get it on an intellectual level. That's probably how we can be of most service here and i get that emotionally you know we just don't want to stop feeling so horrible about the fact that we're in a country where the you know we're seeing this confronted with it and you know we just but at the same time you know the fact that you're there and you have food

it's got to be still just really tough to deal with. Yeah. I've done so much travel, like it's different. This is my first experience, right? So it was so searing. It just, I think so much of me was just torn apart that it was never going to knit back together as if this never happened. Yeah, it's like you're broken open. Yeah. So I got back to Perth and, you know, it's a lovely city

and, you know, I had a nice life. And it was part of a whole process for me of thinking, is this it? You know, we just have a nice life and then die. And I do feel we have, to quote the oft oft quoted mary oliver one wild and precious life and um and it speaks to my own most inner integrity as well that to truly see and to truly And to then not act, it erodes me as much as it erodes energetically in our world. So I do this partly out of self-reservation. So what was your next move? It sounds like the request that was made of you and the whole group when you were there was,

don't go home and just move on with your life. You know, like, if our commitment is to shine a light, then how does that land with you and where does that move you? Yeah, well, I got home and I had to then sort of invent how I was going to be involved. And I really realized that actually what we need is money and that was really confronting for me because I'm not a fundraiser and we're so weird about money as well in our society and our own money and we have such a scarcity mindset where we don't think we have it and then you're pressing into other people's if you're asking other people to give then they then you have all their weirdness going on and um but I

realized you know what so not about me and I don't get a toaster if you give money to the hunger project so for about five years I was a volunteer and I just asked people to give and I was really bad at it for quite some time but as I, people could see it just wasn't about me. So I knew we needed to somehow move some resources from one part of the world to the other. But also I feel that we have our own hunger to connect and to help as well. So it helps.

I feel like I'm doing a public service too. So I did that as a volunteer for about five years and I did a lot of inner work as well. So I'd already learned to meditate a few years earlier. I'm still a, I've been a nearly a lifetime meditator, I suppose. So I dug in with that and I read a lot and just tried to make also that sort of contextual sense of a world where it's so disparate and then my place within that. So I did a lot of inner work as well. Yeah, because I would imagine also if you're taking on,

if in your mind you're saying, okay, I'm going deeper into this, part of that has got to be on some level, an inventory of, do I have the fortitude, the inner skills, the mindset skills, the emotional skills to be able to handle this on this level, and what it may just bring up in me without being, you mentioned you came home and been on the ground aid workers. And what I've learned is that the toll that it can take on the people who are on the ground can be devastating. And sometimes the lifespan of the service can be short-lived just because it leads to a lot of bad stuff physically and emotionally. So it's, I mean, when you were sort of doubling down to meditation and your own personal development, was this the driver before? Or was there something that wasn't, you just knew that you kind of had to go there on a more aggressive level? I think I'd already started that process, which is sort of what had led me,

I think, to The Hunger Project and deciding to go. And in fact, during that five years, I went to India. So I went to India in 95 and different countries and had lots of experiences. And I dwell a lot in the inner world and try to live as consciously as I can. So I try, to me, I just can't live out there. It has to be that sort of match between two. And I'm not an aid worker so I think people who work in the, say, in a refugee camp or something like that, I just think that's got to be the toughest gig because all you see is the effects of sort of the end result and and no sort of future or way out

and the thing that constantly is able to inspire me about the work that we do it's working with human possibility and mindset and creating a different outcome in a community through unlocking the potential of the poorest and the woman, for instance, is how she gets to move from not being able to leave her own hut to actually speaking publicly in meetings and running campaigns to stop child marriages. And I get to talk and connect and learn from her, right? So it's a different context that I am immersed in. But that said, I still have, I do have times when we call it re-entry

of coming back and it's been really hard and so I've had to and sometimes you don't know that you've sort of been gotten by it and you just, so sometimes I just feel sort of quite dead. And coming back into sort of modern. Yeah, coming back to Australia. Yeah, and it's only happened like about two or three times. But, yeah, trying to make sense of, like once I was in India and I was out near the Pakistan border I was in Rajasthan

there was very little drinkable water and so one of the effects of that was people's faces had all these cracks down there and little kids had them as well down their faces it's like when you over boil an egg you know you get those like little cracks so the skin wasn't open. And then I was walking around this village and I met this woman there who was a widow and she had seven children and none of her kids were at school. She couldn't afford it and she was an agricultural labourer and she'd get three months' work a year and that was it, collecting ground peanuts.

She had this tiny little hut and I went in there and the only thing that she had in there was this small clay water jug and she had a toddler, like a two-year-old, and a few little rags on the floor that they were sleeping on. And my colleague was saying, was just sort of pointing out that if that broke, that's half a day's wages of the, did you only work three months? Like it's a catastrophe. And this little kid was sort of running around and stuff.

And I just thought it's so messed up. And even though we don't, you know, we're not sort of about handouts or anything like that, I'm like I could just, you know, it doesn't cost me anything to set this family up. So I went straight into a like a let's fix it sort of thing. And the work we do in India is working with elected women leaders and most of them are non-literate as well, but they get voted into their local council and they're then able to access funds and schemes

from the government that they don't know exist. like for instance, widows' pensions. So widows can get the pension, but if you're like this woman in the village, you can't read, you can't write, you don't know it exists. Even if you did, you don't know how to get it. And even if you knew how to get it, how do you overcome those bureaucrats who looked, you know, there's a whole world of pain for you to try and just access what's yours. But so the women that we train in the village are able to then access it. And so I met with one of them who had the forms filled in and this woman with seven children was about to then go on the widow's pension, which then just creates that livelihood for her, you know, for her to look after her family. And so it's things like that.

And I got back. So I was out in the middle of, you know, desert near the Pakistan border and seeing stuff like that. And then I ended up in back in Perth actually for a family wedding and it was Christmas time. You'll find this amusing because Australia, it's obviously summer at Christmas time and we often spend Christmas at the beach, but I happened to be in Target and they had like this fake snow everywhere and it was just, it would have been bizarre at the best of times, but I just come back from India and I was just walking around and it just, that means that I've clicked and not in a particularly good way. Anyway, I realised I sort of needed to talk through my re-entry and managed to do that and came out the other side so it does get you every now and then yeah i mean the flip side of it is it's as much as it gets you if i mean it's also got to be able to return it's got to cultivate

a pretty extraordinary sense of gratitude on some level too and maybe and and i guess i would ask you you know does do you then turn around and say okay like the moment at target and it's just really bizarre and off but then like as you settle back in does the way that you serve does sort of like the the life of service that you've developed do you feel like that in some way heightens your sense of appreciation for the small things on just any given day. Yeah. So I am so present to what a beautiful, amazing world we live in. And I'm constantly moved by that in a daily way. So yes, I know more than most what happens in the world and I've met more than my fair share of 12- and 13-year-old girls who are married and pregnant and, you know, I've seen stuff and yet it doesn't diminish my sense of beauty and love

and being grateful. And probably it heightens it, as you say um and that's where i try to come from and when i can't come from there then i think that's time to then go and try and do something else so we kind of um we jump past probably one important part of the story which is that while you started off in one capacity you had eventually moved on to become, I guess, the head or the CEO of The Hunger Project in Australia. And have now spent years traveling the world, largely, in that capacity and spending a lot of time,

like you just said, in India. And I know you've spoken about and you've written about some moments and stories, and you were just talking about seeing what happens to women. And it's funny because when I think the Hunger Project, the first thing I think of immediately is, well, like food, food, food, food. But really what I came to learn through your work is that there's actually, there's societal, there's political, there's educational.

There are so many different ways to go at this rather than taking a truck and pulling it up and opening the back gate. And that some of those other things, while world. I mean, tell me a little bit about the lives and the limitations of some of the girls and women that you've seen in different parts of the world, because I think we're just sitting in Australia, sitting in the United States, sitting in the UK, where it's alien to us that some of these things go on. Yeah, when we think of ending hunger, we think of feeding people. But hunger, what causes it is a whole sort of nexus of issues.

So it's access to water, it's access to rights, it's access to freedom of movement. And our understanding and borne out through many years of research and many, many organisations feel the same way is around the way societies are constructed is one of the key drivers that keep hunger in place, particularly around social conditions to do with women and girls. And when you think about it, these communities, women are given the sole responsibility to raise, care, educate, protect, feed,

care for children, and yet they're systematically denied freedom of movement, education, ability, voice to be able to do that. And so you have sort of cycles and generations of malnourished girls giving birth and non-fully formed girls giving birth to malnourished girls giving birth and non-fully formed girls giving birth to malnourished babies, and you have this sort of cycle continuing. When you say girls, you're literally talking about 12-, 13-, 14-year-old girls. Yeah, that's still very prevalent. And what happens is that in the countries, particularly across South Asia and Africa,

it's not legal to marry your daughters at a young age. But particularly in South Asia, there's real economic incentives to do it, which can be surprising in that firstly you give birth to a daughter and that's considered a sad occasion. So when a boy is born in India and parts of Bangladesh, there'll be drums and there'll be lollies given out and it's this fabulous thing. And it's complete silence when there's a girl born.

Why is that? They're breastfed less. Because it's a girl, they're just not valued. And it's also considered because they can leave the house, they're not really here. They're sort of transients on their way to a marriage. So girls are breastfed less because the mother hopes to try for a son, often not educated, so the girl becomes the labourer

or takes care of the younger children or the farm animals. And then as soon as possible, she's married off to then start her own. She ends up starting her own family. So, and in parts of Bangladesh, for instance, there's a dowry system which is across South Asia, but the girl's family has to, what that means is that the girl's family pays money to the boy's family to basically get the girl married. So if you've got a number of daughters, that's actually a real economic liability for you because you have to pay all this money to get your daughters married.

But what happens is that the younger a girl is, the less dowry in some places that you actually pay. So for the younger and less educated a girl, the less money it's going to cost to get her married. So you try and get her married. So you get her married off at a girl, the less money it's going to cost to get her married. So you try and get her married. So you get her married off at a younger age. But this is an issue, the whole issue around women and freedom of movement, women's rights, women's rights to speak, to participate,

to have a voice in decisions that affect their own lives. It's a construct that both women and men participate in. So it's just the unexamined context of a community. So there isn't like these men are terrible and these women are whatever. And so this is what I find constantly fascinating is how firstly shining light on this and then creating some other way for the community to relate to each other and to relate to their future that has women be empowered. And in fact, seeing that we do want to end hunger in our community, actually maybe, you know, if women were educated and if this

happened, that happened, then we would get this better outcome. And so it sort of makes sense in that sort of logical way. And so it's sort of addressed at that systems level rather than a finger wagging. Yeah. And I would imagine if you went in finger wagging, A, you're not going to be welcomed by the vast majority of the local culture. And plus it's, you know, who are we to go in and say like we've got the right culture and you guys are messed up sure we look at it you know and we're like oh my god that's horrible but this has been going on for generations and generations it's the only thing that they know and i'm sure that in their minds this this is just the way it is yeah you know and then we come in wagging our fingers saying no we've got the right way to do it.

There's a certain amount of arrogance to that. Yeah. Well, that's a really good point because I don't go in there and do work on the ground. And one of the great things about The Hunger Project is that we only, it's very rare actually, we only have local people working in each country. So there's only Indians working in India, Bangladeshis working in Bangladesh for exactly that reason. And then what we've done, we have a very small staff, and what we've done is trained up more than 400,000 local volunteers. So it's people in that very community.

You just said 400,000. 400,000. It's just amazing. It's just. That's powerful. Yeah. So powerful. Yeah.

And so they are from that village. So the team from, say, the head office in Malawi, for instance, will then go to a community and start mobilizing. And having these conversations around we could actually end hunger. And they're like, what? You're kidding. That's not possible? And they're like, well, yes, it is.

And it's really funny because the villagers look for the food truck or the money bag. And then that starts the whole dialogue around, we can actually end hunger. Our community, we're not fated to be poor. We're not fated. God has not deserted us. Just because we've always been hungry and we're hungry now does not mean that our future has to continue on that way. We can actually interrupt that and create a different scenario. And that's the beginning of the process that can take up to two years for a community start to shift their own mindset. We train up the volunteer leaders from there and they're the ones then going door to door,

talking to other people in that village to say, you these are things that we can do because i i have to imagine that the belief in the possibility of that outcome has got to be one of the most brutal hurdles to overcome because when you've come from generations where it is like this is just our our lot how do you how do you get people to believe that it's not when, like, everywhere they look, they don't see evidence to the contrary? Yeah, it's just incredible, the power of humanity to choose a different course and outcome for themselves and ourselves. So one example is actually in Malawi where,

so you can imagine that you're in a village just surrounded by people and we're talking like rural areas, Jonathan, so not in the city. So people are not exposed. There's no TV out there. There's often no radio, very few cell phones. It's people that's very superstitious, very unexposed people. We would think exactly the same way if we were living out there and had just seen what we had seen.

And so the Hunger Project team, who are all from Malawi, and many grew up in villages themselves, pull the community together and start talking about the end of hunger. And one of the things that they do, they put this flip chart, like a piece of butcher's paper, up on a tree, and they talk about where did the food come from when we get sort of food given to us by the government or aid agencies? Where did it come from?

Is it a superhuman being who grows this food? The people are like, no, you know, it must be farmers, you know, in America or somewhere because they see the name America written on a canada or, written on a bag. And he says, well, what are these, you know, does God, how come these people can grow food? Is it because they're blessed by God? And people are like, no.

Well, firstly, people think, he actually asked, do they wake up in the morning and God has delivered grain in front of their house and they've got too much there and they just bundle it up and send it to Africa. And they say, no, no, for sure, because God is fair. And if God was dropping food in front of American homes, then our turn would have come. So they grow their food. Okay, so everyone realized Americans grow the food. And so let's see what this superhuman food farmer looks like and so he has this flip chart and people are calling out what is this like mythical being who can grow all this food and send it you know this person and you know one head two arms

all this sort of stuff he writes it off up on the flip chart he puts the flip chart down and then he tells a story to like break that pattern, what they're just talking about. And then he puts up another flip chart and says, okay, well, what do we look like? We're trying to grow food. What do we look like? And then they, you know, one head, two arms. And so then he puts them up side by side and people,

it's like literally they lose their, they're just like, what? Because everything's the same. He like crosses out one head, one head, two arms, two arms, and then it comes down to skin colour. It's like, well, they're white and we're black. That's what the problem is. He says, well, no, and he does this whole thing around race and skin colour and, you know, if I cut my, what colour blood do you think the Americans have?

Is it green? Is it blue? No, for sure it would be black. It would be red. So it just starts this and so he talks about the, you know, American food farmers as, you know, mythical and, you know, we're poor and desperate. And what's extraordinary, Jonathan, is that process happens across all of Africa.

And in Malawi, and it happens across the epicenters where we work, earlier last year there was a terrible famine in Malawi and the government was asking for grain. And that very community that six or seven years earlier had thought that they could never grow their own food and it was this mythical superhuman being who'd grow food because of the activities they'd taken. They bundled up, it was about 650 or some really large

amount of kilograms of maize from their own stores and sent it to the government of Malawi to distribute to other people in their country living in famine and they talked amongst themselves and said we have become that superhuman being right And then that spreads throughout all of the other communities where we're working and other things. It really starts to shift that mindset, which is what we're wanting, is that people can be self-reliant and can do have the wherewithal with the right support and the right everything like that. So that's like an example of how that whole sort of process begins.

And then within the community, these trained volunteers are running sort of AIDS workshops, HIV AIDS workshops to demystify that and to get people on the right drugs. And then there's microfinance that we do. And then there's safe birthing and there's just constantly all talking and mobilizing each other. And so it's done by them. And I think that's what's so powerful. And I am able to then just bear witness to it and be there and learn from them.

And I think, I mean, that's one reason why I wrote the book is that, and I've now taken many people out to see that, is that we can learn so much about human beings and human potential and leadership and being an entrepreneur from, you know, courses or reading Steve Jobs' biography or whatever. But I love the fact that actually you'll learn more about what it means to be resilient, bold, kick-ass, get-stuff-done person from that non-literate woman food farmer in an Indian village. She's got what it takes to show us what it really means

in terms of what's possible. So I like that sort of flip on it all. Yeah, that's so powerful to me also because when you think of leaders, all those names you just have to come to mind. You're thinking of the big ones you've seen in the media and stuff like that, but the people that don't come to mind are those probably thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people that are actually just, you know,

in a tiny little place where there will never be, you know, any media attention. But they become a leader in their own lives, in their family's lives, and, you know, a little bit every day. And you magnify that,ify that, that's power. As you were speaking, sort of telling that story, there's sort of the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, one of the earliest things that he really studied brought to the forefront was this idea of learned helplessness. And the idea that you can actually, through an experience

that may have happened generations ago, a certain pattern of behavior and assumptions develops in one person or a family of people. And that gets accepted as gospel and just passed down from generation to generation and never, ever, ever again tested. And if that behavior adds up to a collective feeling of helplessness, then you've got this helplessness, which may be in the original circumstance, there was something that caused it that was legitimate, but has long since left the building. But the behavior and the assumptions continue to be passed around and become pervasive. And people never kick the tires. They never test the assumptions because they're just told it is what it is. And so as you're speaking, that popped into my mind

because I'm thinking what you're doing is you're bringing people back to this place and saying, you know, like test your assumptions. And then by creating small wins in, you know, like a family and then a village, you can then use sort of like step one is test your assumptions. Maybe they're not quite right. And then we'll look at this village that was you a couple of years ago. And then all of a sudden, there's a little bit of evidence that it's possible.

I mean, that's powerful. That is so powerful. I think one of the assumptions, too, that it tests is what our opinion is of who the hungry really are. Yeah. Talk to me more about that. So, well, we do. We feel equally, we in the more resourced world, we feel equally resigned and cynical and fatalistic. And we don't feel we can do anything. And especially when we think about hunger and poverty, global hunger, people just feel overwhelmed. Yeah, we feel helpless to do anything also.

And also we probably, there's got to be some level of judgment. I don't know. Well, we're always judging. That's it being human. It's the Western mind too. Yeah. But we think, know it's it's a bottomless pit and there's a billion mouths to feed and and i think it's this feeling of

uh we've spent so much money on aid it doesn't seem to make any difference and it's like we somehow need this huge amount of energy whether it's resources or world focus to move this sort of amorphous mass of hunger to some sort of end goal. And that's just exhausting. And it's not true because it's true if you see the hungry as this sort of group of people who are victims and, I don't know, like kind of not human actually. But when you see them as fully human, resourceful, capable, creative, capable of everything that we're capable of.

So the question then becomes, how do we unlock their leadership, their entrepreneurialism, their spark so that they can end their own hunger, they can navigate their way in partnership with the rest of the world to end hunger, that's a very different dynamic to a billion mouths to feed. Instead, it's a billion human beings who have everything invested in bettering their own lives. And what's been missing is either the contextual shift, the mindset shift, the right support and empowerment, the belief that it's possible and then investing in that. So we still, as a world community, we still don't really invest in people's on-the-ground own leadership and ability.

We still do things for them in a way that perpetuates this sort of belief that somehow they're not up to it. And I think that's part of the paradigm that needs to shift as well. Yeah, and I guess, and clearly you know this better than I, but from just a little that I've been exposed to your world, it seems like there also is a bit of a bit of divide on like, what is the appropriate way to serve? There are, you know, there's, there's one side which says, just give them the end product. And there's the other side that says, you know, like, you know, empower them to figure

out how to, how to do it themselves. Is there sort of an ongoing conversation around what's the most effective way to create the outcome you're looking to create? There is. And people do approach stuff from their different perspectives and experience as well. And it's incredible that in September last year, the world signed on to the Sustainable Development Goals

or the Global Goals, which one of them is around ending hunger by 2030. So there's now global alignment that hunger can end by 2030, which is pretty mind-blowing to think that, you know what, this actually could be, we can be the generation that actually got this piece of work done. And that's just not us saying that. That's the world now saying that. So how we do that is it's going to take so many multifaceted,

multi-pronged approach. There won't just be one way of doing it. So we do need infrastructure, global infrastructure and debt justice and taxation reform and we need, you know, there's a lot of structural stuff we need. There's just and everyone can bring their piece to it. The piece that we bring to it that we're very passionate about is this concept of community-led development, of people's own initiative, the power of human potential and the power of people on the ground to navigate and bring their best self to this and having that invested in. Because that process I was talking about with the butcher's paper

and all that sort of stuff, that mindset shifting of talking from what, I can end my own hunger? That's just like nuts to actually, wow, yes, and I'm now taking action, can take up to two years. And it's sort of, I find it very sexy, Jonathan, yes, and I'm now taking action can take up to two years. And it's sort of, I find it very sexy, Jonathan, actually, but it's not particularly sexy for donors or big governments and that sort of stuff because they want to know, they want to build the school and how many kids have you got in there

and do that sort of stuff. But it's like, well, actually, what's the awakening process that has to happen that people start to understand that actually getting my kid to school instead of having them work in the field for half a dollar a day and having them be in school is actually a good investment. Like that whole process needs to be invested in as well. So that's the piece that The Hunger Project brings

to the global conversation around ending hunger is that human being potential, both on the ground in villages but also us in our parts of the world so that we start to see that we could be part of ending hunger by 2030 and bringing our sort of creative energy to it and our voice and our resources and our passion so that I think about being, you know, in 2031, I mean, I won't be, you know, sitting up on my veranda and just, you know, feed up job well done kind of stuff. But being one of millions who had it happen, it's like a man on the moon scenario,

but it won't happen just through business as usual. And I think it'll say a lot about us as humanity to get it done. And clearly I'm excited about Any Hunger by 2030. So, and kind of building on that, this has been a huge focal point of your life for two and a half decades now, I guess. How has, this is a tough question to answer, but I'll ask it anyway. How do you feel being so deeply involved in such a cause with such deep, profound impact and having exposure to so many people in both on the service side and in the need of service side? What's that done to you well it's an easy question to answer actually because it's it's completely it's been the making of me so um i'm well educated and went to

said uni and everything but the years in the field and the exposure to both the issue and how that plays out, but also the amazing human response to it has just, has been my greatest education and the poorest of the poor have been my greatest teachers. So one of the biggest things that I've learnt, many, many things, I think one of the biggest things for me has been around love and learning to love in a way that is, I think, unusual. So, you know, I fell in love with my husband, as I said earlier, I still am, and I've got two children. Obviously I love them, love my friends and all that sort of stuff.

But there's something about being in a village and it's easy to love and feel compassion for that woman who walks two miles a day to get one way to get the water and all that sort of stuff. And that young girl who was married at 13 and and had her first baby within within the year but how do you love the man in the hut in Bangladesh who has the acid on his floor in a little container that is there as a threat to throw on his wife's face. So battery acid burning is still prevalent, about 1,500 reported cases in Bangladesh a year as it is.

And that's true. I was in a hut and that was there and he may never use it but it's there as a threat to her to keep her in line and so many other things like that so over the years it's it's so what sort of emerges is this sort of rage and like wanting to just make him terribly terribly wrong and very polarizing to actually being able to love him and seeing actually that part of him in myself and loving my displaced self as well so that's been a huge journey around if we believe that and I do believe that we're interconnected to a very powerful level and that not just that we affect each other, but that at that most profound level, we are

each other. And quantum physics shows that that's true. And the great religions are not religious at all, but believe that's true. And so how do you live that? Jonathan has been one of the central questions of my life as well not just loving all the really awesome bits but how do you love the whole of it and and how can I be in a village and feel full love while seeing stuff that is the opposite arguably to that so that's been and that's still like a constant practice

of being able to loving it all basically and it's really opened me up. I used to be like a really closed off person actually so I'd choose, pick the people that I would, you know, and then the rest of them. But that's probably been one of my biggest changes, actually. Which I think is a good place to come full circle. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up?

Hmm. I think it's to listen to what your heart and sort of soul is urging you to do and have the courage to do that. Whatever that is, I think. That's what I think it is to live a good life. Thank you. Thank you. that's what I think it is to live a good life thank you thank you hey thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you found something valuable entertaining engaging or just plain fun I'd be so appreciative if you take a couple extra seconds and share it maybe you want to email it to a friend maybe you want to share it around social media or even be awesome if you head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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