Posts Tagged ‘Share Our Strength’

Bearing Witness to Haiti

By admin / February 2nd, 2010 / Categories: Corporate Social Responsibility, earthkeeping
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The following is an email sent by Timberland President and CEO Jeff Swartz to Timberland employees worldwide, chronicling his recent trip to Haiti.  We’re sharing it here on Earthkeepers because we believe it stands up to its name — "bearing witness" — as a powerful account of destruction and survival in Haiti … and provides perspective for the important work that lies ahead as the nation rebuilds.

Team Timberland,

So, what’s so hard about this note, which I have intended to write for a week?  Last week, I visited Haiti, in the company of Bill Shore , the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, and a Timberland Board member, and chair of the Board’s Corporate Social Responsibility Committee, and in the company of Wyclef Jean , a 12 time Grammy award winner, a Haitian musician and activist, Timberland’s partner in an effort to plant trees and reforest Haiti, as part of our global Earthkeeper efforts.  The visit was in response to the earthquake that struck Haiti 3 weeks ago; our visit was an attempt to focus Timberland’s Earthkeeper resources temporarily on disaster relief.  The trip was emotional and powerful; I left Saturday night and was back in the office Tuesday.

So, what’s so hard about a brief note that describes the heroism of the many doctors we saw, the heartbreak of the destruction we saw, the inspiration I felt with Bill and Wyclef, and the indignation I felt at the world’s well intended but inept efforts to cope with this disaster?

Maybe it is the scale of the disaster, in the context of a country already ravaged by history.   Maybe it is the raw, emotional experience of being amidst death and destruction, and in the presence of the dying.  Maybe it is the feeling  of futility, the ultimate experience of the City Year “Starfish” story , that  waited for me at each stop we made in Haiti—yes, we made a difference here,  but wow, we did not even scratch the surface of the pain and agony here…

For all these reasons and more, I have not done my job by you; I have not been able to bear witness to you from Haiti. So, below, I have tried to right that wrong.  Call this note, “bearing witness”–but “bear with me” also works–it is a very long note. Long for the reasons I cite above, and long because it is hard even now for me to say simply why a bootmaker flew to Hell and how the experience of that Hell affirmed my belief in the mission of commerce and justice. So, here goes.

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Imagining a New Way Forward

By admin / February 1st, 2010 / Categories: Corporate Social Responsibility, earthkeeping
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Last week , Billy Shore provided a poignant account of his trip to Haiti with Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz and Earthkeeper Wyclef Jean , among others.  Below, Jeff Swartz shares his own thoughts on the devastation in Haiti, how it redefined Timberland’s partnership with our partner Yéle Haiti … and how innovation is built from crisis.

Please note this is excerpted from a piece which appears on Fast Company today.  Please click here to read the entire entry, and our thanks to the Fast Company team for sharing.

After the earthquake

We reached out, and Wyclef moved from celebrity entertainer to Haitian leader—from rapping out lyrics, to rapping out directions.  He told us from the ground, aid is pouring in, and stalling at the airport. Not a question of good instincts, good intentions, pure hearts—but the issue is not about intention, it’s about execution.  Get the food, get the water, get the medical supplies to the people—period.  And Wyclef was hard but clear: we are a for-profit company, with superb logistic competences, and with a factory for over 20 years in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic— just 100 miles from Port au Prince. He told us to urgently mobilize the trucks, open the warehouse, and get material flowing. Yéle will get the food packed—Timberland has to get it delivered.  And then Yéle will do its magic—mobilizing young Haitians, in neighborhoods like Bel Air and Cité Soleil, to distribute food to the hungry, hope to the powerful souls living in the open after the quake.  Do what you do well—do what a great bootmaker does—work your logistics network, and partner with the right entrepreneurial partner, and together—we can deliver good.

And so we did—we mobilized our logistics team in the DR, and went to work.  And while we are not Federal Express or UPS—we grunted and we got shipments moving over land.

And then Wyclef said—get on the plane and come here, and see the model for building a new Haiti.  A model that is one part the private sector, one part the authentic and effective NGO, and nine parts the spirit of free Haiti.  See Timberland plus Yéle plus the young of Haiti work in a specific, focused way to be part of creating a new Haiti.

So I went. They say journeys are more about who you travel with, and less about the itinerary. On this voyage, I had the company and counsel of heroes —like Bill Shore (the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, Timberland board member and teacher of mine), and a team from Partners in Health who needed a ride to this island in desperate need of medical miracles. We made our way to Port au Prince. And in the searing humidity, we served 8,000 hot meals that Yéle had found a way to cook.  We served from the back of a truck, in Cité Soleil. We sweated, and cried, and we saw the outlines of a way forward.  One part private sector competence and passion, one part on-the-ground entrepreneurial NGO brilliance, and 9 parts Haitian strength and dignity and grace and energy.  And when we wheeled out of Cité Soleil, while my heart will never be the same, neither will my head.

Spending two days in post-earthquake Haiti does not make me akin to its survivors — but it was time enough for me to develop a new understanding of crisis and devastation and reaffirmed for me, a third-generation entrepreneur, that out of crisis flows innovation.  Before the earthquake, I was the CEO of a for-profit company with strength to share and a passion for commerce and justice.  Planting trees in Haiti felt like, looked like, the right thing to do.  It still is.  Only now, post-quake, I’m a CEO with strength and passion who has witnessed both frustration and amazingly, hope in both a ravaged land and its survivors.  Tomorrow we’ll plant trees … today we’re growing a logistical network from Santiago to Cité Soleil.  Tomorrow we’ll revisit our marketing plans — today we’re leveraging our strategy skills to figure out how to get more food into the hands of the hungry.  Trees, yes, community building, yes — a solid vision for the future is as critical to Haiti’s survival as anything right now.  But before the re-growth, a nation needs to heal, and before it can heal, it needs help.

Jeff Swartz
President & CEO, Timberland

Letter from Haiti

By admin / January 26th, 2010 / Categories: Uncategorized
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This past weekend, Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz traveled to Haiti via the Dominican Republic along with Haiti’s own Earthkeeper Wyclef Jean and Bill Shore , Timberland board member and founder and executive director of Share Our Strength.  Billy shared the following reflections with his Share Our Strength community upon his return, and was kind enough to also share it with us:

“The most dangerous place in the world right now is the sky over Haiti. It is filled with so many helicopters in a very small space. One has already crashed” warned the airport official briefing our pilot.

The Blackhawk we were supposed to fly to Port au Prince from the Dominican Republic had been cancelled at the last minute but I didn’t mind because the only word I’ve ever associated with the word Blackhawk is the word “down.”  Instead we flew a smaller chopper, low enough to get a taste of the destruction and suffering we were soon to meet face to face.

We’d flown to the Dominican Republic thanks to the generosity of Timberland which lent its plane to shuttle Partners in Health doctors and supplies. We made good use of our layover though.  Haiti’s favorite son, Wyclef Jean, a 12 time Grammy winner who led our delegation had obtained a meeting at the presidential palace in Santo Domingo with President Leonel Fernandez . The earthquake has led to an unprecedented level of cooperation between the two countries. We pressed for even more and he assured us that “stepping back from long term investment in Haiti is unacceptable.”

Afterward, from the air we could see an endless stream of supply trucks slowly making their way to Haiti on the narrow land route that hugs the coast.  Landing in Port au Prince we were met by security and military officials. One told me: “I’ve been to Rwanda, Kosovo, Indonesia, you name it. But this is different. Nothing prepares you for something like this.”

You’ve seen the pictures, more unforgettable than words. Mountains of collapsed rubble stretch mile after mile. We saw only two bulldozers during our entire visit.  The clean up alone will be years, not months.
With Wyclef we went to Cite de Soleil, one of the poorest areas of Port au Prince. We were there to distribute food from a truck stuffed top to bottom with Styrofoam containers of cooked meals. The combination of Wyclef and the food led to an almost instant crush of thousands of Haitian children and their parents for as far as the eye could see.

In our work I’ve often seen the gratitude that comes from families receiving meals.  What I’d never seen before was the panic on the faces of so many people who knew better than I did that the food would run out before we’d served even a fraction of those who’d had nothing but an energy biscuit or power bar in the ten days since the quake struck.

The crowd became larger and surged forward.  A few fights broke out, but there was no real violence, just hunger in the starkest and truest sense. At one point the crowd broke through a formidable team of private security and we were pinned against the truck. Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz and I locked eyes in realization of the fragility of a moment that could go either way. Wyclef grabbed a bullhorn and tried to calm the crowd but even his celebrity was no match for their desperation.  The only option was for the truck, almost empty, to speed away, to another neighborhood, where after restocking we began again.

Before I got to Haiti, Share Our Strength had distributed $145,000 to the most effective organizations on the ground here. More has come in since. I like to think we excel at long term solutions, entrepreneurship, and bold thinking.  The time will soon come when such competencies are invaluable. But none of that was worth a pile of concrete rubble in Port au Prince this week. What was required instead was Mother Teresa’s prescription of hands willing to serve and hearts willing to love, which your generosity has enabled us to support.

Now the real test of commitment begins.  I could have lived with myself if we’d chosen not to make this trip, but having made it I won’t be able to live with not going back to continue what we’ve begun.  The airport official who conducted our helicopter briefing was wrong. The greatest danger is not the sky above Port Au Prince, or Cite de Soleil where there was no violence, only desperation.  The real danger is whether our hearts and heads have the capacity to continue to bear witness after the headlines fade and the benefit concerts end, and our lives once again refocus on the many needs even closer to home.

- Billy Shore

Thanksgiving

By admin / November 24th, 2009 / Categories: earthkeeping
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We’re thankful for the leadership, vision and commitment of Bill Shore — Timberland board member and founder and executive director of Share Our Strength , the nation’s leading organization endeavoring to end childhood hunger:

I’ve always been an early riser. One of the things I love most about Maine in summer is that the dawn breaks as early as 4:30 a.m.  I’m usually waiting at the window to catch it. My writing or whatever I’m working on brightens with the new day.  This weekend before Thanksgiving in late November I am still up early. But the wait for daybreak is much longer. It is nearly 6:30 before I get to feel anything other than alone in the darkness.  Finally, a thin line of light appears on the horizon.

This long wait for darkness to lift must be what millions of our fellow Americans feel, trapped by recession, many for the first time in their lives, without jobs and increasingly without food, waiting … waiting… for the dawn to break. Two reports released this month evoke the words of poet William Stafford that “the darkness around us is deep.”

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published its annual report, which showed a record 49 million Americans in 2008 struggling with whether they would have enough to eat. The number of children who experienced the most severe hunger increased from 700,000 to more than 1 million.

And just this morning, Share Our Strength released a survey, prepared by Lake Research Partners showing that this year, 62% of public school teachers are seeing children who regularly come to school hungry because they don’t get enough to eat at home.  The problem is serious enough that 63% of teachers use funds from their own relatively low salaries to buy food for hungry kids in their classroom.

In the darkness it is easy to misdiagnose a problem. When one does, the prescription for treating it is likely to be wrong.  That often happens with hunger in America. Children in our country are not hungry because we lack food, or because we lack food and nutrition programs.  We are blessed with abundance of both, and for more than 25 years there has been bipartisan support for effective food programs like school lunch, school breakfast and food stamps.

Children in America who are hungry are hungry because they aren’t enrolled in these programs.  Even in a weak economy, that is a solvable problem. But it requires more than the federal expansion of food and nutrition programs (which we also support). It requires working at the state and local levels to close the gap in the number of children who are already eligible for such programs but not enrolled or participating.

Maybe families don’t know the programs exist. Maybe kids can’t get to them. Our work is sometimes as simple as staffing a hotline to connect children with summer feeding sites in their neighborhood, or as complicated as lobbying for universal breakfast in the classroom, which tackles the challenge of kids not getting to school early enough for free breakfast, and the stigma that often prevents them from participating.

The barriers that keep children from programs that can prevent hunger are varied – and our strategy is tackling every one – state by state. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Denver with Colorado Governor Ritter to announce the launch of just such an effort, much as we’ve done with Governor O’Malley in Maryland and will be doing with others around the U.S. Our strategy is working, our network is growing in size and influence and we’re more certain than ever that we can end childhood hunger by 2015, but we need your continued support .

As governors with shrinking state budgets find themselves cutting social programs they’d prefer to grow, Share Our Strength’s strategy offers a ray of hope by bringing badly needed and already authorized federal dollars into their states to help feed children. Given projections that unemployment will remain at 10% or above through 2010, that states will continue to struggle with budget crises, as will food banks with shortages, Share Our Strength’s state-based strategy is the fastest, most realistic way to ensure that children get fed.

During the holiday season’s predictable media coverage of food banks and families in need of emergency assistance, it is worth noting that the USDA reports that just one in five families enrolled in programs like food stamps and school meals has actually visited a food pantry.  Standing in a line at a food pantry in crisis is the last place a family should be. If instead, they are taking advantage of programs that stretch their food budget, teach them how to shop for and cook nutritious foods, and ensure that their children have free school and summer meals, they will never need to be there. This is the work that Share Our Strength is doing, and we need your continued support.

Please make the most generous gift possible this year, and help ensure that our work continues.

As I finish writing this, the sun has climbed high in the sky. I’m reminded that increasingly Share Our Strength’s role is to help bring light where there has been darkness, to educate hungry families and local government officials about untapped existing resources for feeding kids.

Thanks for all you are doing to help. Our early successes leave us confident of achieving our ambitious goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015.  Once we do, there will be at least one less reason for families to wait anxiously for the dawn.

- Billy Shore

Board Dinner Meets Taco Night; Hungry Kids Benefit

By admin / July 23rd, 2009 / Categories: Corporate Social Responsibility
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Part of the regular governance of a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange is … board meetings.

Part of the regular cycle of board meetings is … board dinners, usually the night before.

Last night, Timberland’s board met for dinner at Andy Husbands’ restaurant — Tremont 647 in Boston.

$2 tacos are a Tuesday night phenomenon in the South End at Andy’s place — but because of the Hell’s Kitchen show, Tuesday tacos moved to Wednesday night.  Even though I can’t eat it (the kosher kid brings his own delicacies…), I figured the Board would enjoy some local cool cuisine.  So, they started with tacos.

Quickly enough, we ended up with the regular menu.  The Board is cool, but the cuisine was … hot … and so, back to the menu.

Andy came in to say hello.  As a TV star part of Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, Andy is a pretty hip celeb these days.

But not for the cuisine, not for the celebrity shoulder rubbing — not for those reasons did I take the Board to Tremont 647.

No, when Timberland’s shareholders pay for the Board’s dinner, they insist that we not just feed our desire for a good mea l– they insist that we use their funds to high purpose, the purpose of commerce and justice. So, when we schedule a business dinner, we host them in a restaurant affiliated with Share Our Strength (SOS) – a national nonprofit organization focused on ending childhood hunger in America.

Share Our Strength restaurants support the effort by donating a portion of their profits to SOS, or participating in one of the organization’s fund-and awareness-raising events … Andy and his team at Tremont 647 do both.  Andy has been actively engaged with SOS for years, and his restaurant has hosted SOS’s Boston Operation Frontline program for more than a decade — providing space and support for more than 5,000 people to receive nutrition education, food budgeting strategies and cooking skills.  In the real world, that kind of teaching is infinitely more valuable than anything Gordon Ramsay could dish out.  Hell’s Kitchen is a clever TV concept, but a high-brow restaurant delighting its clientele and serving to end childhood hunger — this is, Heaven trumps Hell.  Period.

The intersection of commerce and justice lives at Tremont 647.  With equal attention and passion, Andy serves Tibetan Momo Dumplings and serves the needs of children at risk for hunger … and from the comfort of our table, we fill our heads with business talk while helping to fill the bellies of kids who don’t have enough food.  The work of changing the world doesn’t always feel like work; in the right company, in the right atmosphere, it can be downright delicious.

Jeff Swartz
President & CEO, Timberland