Donors’ cost concerns spur Heifer to envision global village cutbacks
Posted on Saturday, October 14, 2006
Heifer International expects to scale back plans for its “global village” in Little Rock after some of the charity’s donors balked at the project’s $ 64 million price tag.
The project was designed to include eight villages encircling a 45-foot mountain, classrooms and holding areas for animals. Its cost would be just $ 3 million less than Heifer spent in 2005 on all of its operations.
Tom Peterson, senior vice president of communications and marketing, acknowledged Friday that some donors were concerned that the money needed to build a planned educational center and the global village next to the world-hunger charity’s $ 17. 5 million headquarters could be better used elsewhere.
“We heard early on that many of our donors were concerned about the cost, so we have explored ways to bring down the cost but provide the exact same experience.”
Because the project is still in early planning stages, Peterson said, there are no details yet on what might be cut or how much lower the project’s price might be.
No proposed changes have gone to the Heifer board of directors, Peterson said.
“I’m not sure that we’ll have everything that was in the first model, but nothing has been officially changed,” he said. “Will it be exactly the same ? I seriously doubt it.”
The charity unveiled designs and kicked off its fundraising campaign for the project in October 2004.
The work is an ambitious undertaking for Heifer, an organization based in Arkansas since 1971. The charity works on more than 400 projects in 50 countries worldwide.
The 62-year-old charity provides animals, such as alpacas, water buffalo and rabbits, and bees to families in underdeveloped countries around the world and in more than 25 U. S. states. Heifer trains recipients to care for the animals, use them to improve their lives and pass the animals’ offspring on to others.
According to Heifer’s 2005 annual report, 24. 6 percent of its expenses were classified as administrative — salaries, building maintenance and other such costs. Fifty-six percent of its money went to anti-hunger initiatives and 18. 8 percent to education programs.
Better Business Bureau standards for accountability recommend that charitable organizations spend at least 65 percent of total revenues on charity work.
Modeled after Heifer’s 1, 200-acre educational ranch in Perryville, the global village was to showcase life in eight countries and North America.
Right now, Peterson said, Heifer is focused only on the education building.
“We’re wrapping up planning for that phase this year. Until the village is built, it will house exciting, interactive exhibits,” Peterson said. “When the global village is built, we’ll move out of that building and into buildings in the village.”
Donna Jared, senior vice president of development at Heifer, said the organization has collected $ 8. 9 million toward the $ 10 million goal for building the education building.
Jared declined to provide the organization’s fund-raising goal for the global village portion of the project.
“We’re really just focused on completing phase two and getting that off the ground,” she said. “We’ll consider plans and concepts for phase three further down the road when we can pay more attention to that part of the plan.”
Jared said they’ve been focusing fundraising efforts for the project in Arkansas, and that most donations so far have come from inside the state.
Construction on a 20, 000-square-foot education center, which will include an exhibit hall, gift shop and conference rooms, is expected to begin next year. No date has been set for groundbreaking on the center, Peterson said, but he expects one to be chosen in the coming months, possibly early next year.
Like Heifer’s headquarters, the center plans call for an environmentally conscious design, including a roof covered with grasses.
By using vegetation for the roofing, the building would provide shade and natural cooling and require less energy for air conditioning, according to the master plan. The roof also would reduce storm water runoff and improve dust filtration and noise control, architects say.
The global village is planned as the final stage of construction for Heifer’s world headquarters, which opened earlier this year. It is designed to be an interactive way to show how families around the world achieve self-reliance through farming. A collection of indigenous homes and interactive exhibits will depict villages from Ecuador, Guatemala, Cameroon, South Africa, Indonesia, China, India and Romania.
The village also is expected to contain an exhibit on poverty and hunger in North America.
Heifer officials have said they expect the global village to eventually draw more than 250, 000 visitors annually.
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