Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Today's guest brings both a fierce urgency and a deep sense of hope to one of humanity's most persistent challenges, hunger. Eric Bebernitz, director of External Relations for Action Against Hunger joins me. He spent more than two decades on the front lines of social justice from the International Rescue Committee to Earth Justice, Planned Parenthood, and for the last five years, leading external relations for one of the world's most respected humanitarian organizations. Action Against Hunger operates in 59 countries, reaching more than 21 million people each year with programs that save lives and build resilience. While many know the organization for delivering Plumpy'Nut, a therapeutic food that can bring a severely malnourished child back to health, their work stretches far beyond emergency nutrition.
They help farmers adapt to climate change, develop clean water systems that prevent disease and violence, harness technology to predict and prevent famine, and work alongside communities to co-create sustainable solutions. In our conversation, Eric takes us inside this complex fight, why hunger is not simply about food, but about inequality, conflict, climate change, and health. As you'll hear, ending hunger isn't just possible. It's one of the smartest investments we can make in a better future for all. So let's begin. Welcome to the show, Eric.
Eric Bebernitz:
Thank you so much, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here. And this is my favorite thing, being able to talk about the great work that Action Against Hunger does around the world. So this is a total pleasure to me.
Carol Cone:
We want our listeners to understand who you are, the depth of your capability, your innovations, your services, your products and such, so that they can say, "I want to support this organization. I want to work with them. I want to support them," whether you're an individual, whether you're a corporation or such.
So that's my ulterior motive for this conversation, but I did have the opportunity to interview your CEO four years ago now, and so a lot has changed. But first, your background. You are, I believe, of the over 200 guests I've ever had on the show, you seem to be made for this role and social impact, so you should really talk, can you share with our listeners the type of work you've done in the past? And then, why do you do the work that you do today?
Eric Bebernitz:
Well, hey, thank you so much for the recognition. In terms of my immediate professional history, I've spent my time largely operating in an international NGO space. So working with the International Rescue Committee for a long time, I worked with the International Planned Parenthood Federation for a number of years, and Earthjustice, which is US-based, but I think the ambition and scope was global in terms of its programmatic impact. It was focused on climate change. But what got me here, this is a question I think I wonder about myself all the time.
I would say broadly, my mother especially, but my father as well. There's a service orientation that my parents imparted on both me and my sister and the rest of us. My dad, his family, they were in the funeral home business, so they helped people at the hardest point in their lives in New York and Florida. And then my mother, unrelated, sort of coincidental, always a nurse, but was a hospice nurse for a long time before she retired. So there's always been that service orientation there. That's what we talk about over dinner, working with people that were struggling in different forms or another, struggling at the end of their life or to regroup at the death of a loved one. And that's impacted me in ways that I don't think I fully realized until I became more of an adult. And then for me, it became, I think when I left graduate school, I didn't realize the depths of the industry, especially the INGO space.
And that became clear to me when I joined IRC. Once you scratch the surface, once you're into it, and once you see the impact that an organization like IRC has every day, whether it's mundane or really superlative, it's truly moving. And I was hooked. And from there I thought, okay, how can I do this? How can I turn this into a real profession? So hey, all those things came together, brought me to Action Against Hunger where I've been steering the external relations team for the past five years.
Carol Cone:
And those five years have been incredibly challenging. First you had COVID, right? And then you had Ukraine and Gaza, and then you have a new administration. And so let's just start with what is the state of hunger in the world today? And then, let's go from there into talk about the unique capabilities of Action Against Hunger.
Eric Bebernitz:
Yeah, great question. Great way to establish who we are. My immediate response is there's the past five years, which have been uniquely challenged, as you indicated, but if you take a step back and look at the wider trajectory of change, so over the past 30 to 40 years, the story is one that's less gloom and doom. And we've seen a market decline in the number of most extreme cases of undernutrition, malnutrition, which Action Against Hunger is focused on solving, that humanity should be quite proud of and we don't talk about enough. 60% reduction. We've been a part of that story along the World Food Program and other key agencies in our space. That's enormous change. But over the last five years, five years plus, we've seen sort of a backslide, especially in key contexts like Sub-Saharan Africa. I think about a month ago or a couple of weeks ago, the annual State of Food Insecurity report was issued, and Action Against Hunger has a unique point of view on that report.
And what that report said to me was a couple of things. One is the last five years have been challenging and it's only getting worse in certain places in which we operate. At the same time, there has been some progress that's notable. Now, I say that with a little bit of hesitation because I don't want to impart this idea that the conclusion is going to be positive and inevitable. There's a lot of work that we need to do to bring parts of Africa to the level that we're seeing now in Latin America and Asia where it's improved.
And what we do and what's unique for us is that we go to some of the hardest to reach places. We're deeply ingrained with the community, and so that gives us access that others don't have. So whether it's conflict-ridden Ethiopia and Somalia or parts of South Sudan and Sudan, along with all the superlative sort of humanitarian crises of our era that we've been participating in directly, whether that's Gaza, [inaudible 00:11:07], Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, and places where there's been natural disasters, we've been there. That's what we do. Our DNA is humanitarian assistance. So our job as an organization is to be there to help people where they need it the most and then to, like I said, work alongside them to address the root causes that are driving hunger today.
Carol Cone:
What is the origin story of Action Against Hunger?
Eric Bebernitz:
Yeah, so we have a beautiful origin story. It was concerned citizen scientists, intellectuals, public figures in France in the late seventies appalled by what they saw happening and play out in Afghanistan, catastrophic malnutrition among children. They got together and said, "This has got, we have to play a role as human beings who care in stopping this, and what are we going to do to stop this?" And the story quickly becomes that story of innovation. So that group were able to galvanize support to the creation of the F-100 formula. And in the seventies how we treated malnutrition is very different than how we treat it now. It was really, it's always a medical intervention because it's an acute medical state. But in that instance, we had to put kids and family members in the hospital to administer the F-100 formula. It's a milk-based formula, it's perishable. It needed to be handled with care.
So we were part of the group that created that. And as a result, we're able to save thousands of lives in Afghanistan in the late seventies. And of course, the need didn't stop there. So that group saw a need elsewhere around the world and it quickly grew to where we became arguably the largest organization with a singular focus on ending hunger globally.
Carol Cone:
Talk about the structure, because you have over 9,000 people mostly on the ground, and I think that people really don't understand the breadth, the reach, the innovation.
Eric Bebernitz:
Oh, this is where the real work happens. We do important stuff in the United States to guide the technical expertise or advocate in Washington, but those 9,000 employees, the vast majority of them are from the countries in which they work or neighboring countries. We're not talking about an expat population. Overall, we say 95%, but in certain contexts it's nearly a hundred percent. It's the only way that we get things done. There are people that have been born and raised in a community and now are working on behalf of Action Against Hunger to support their brother and sisters who are in harm's way in that particular moment. It's the true shining star for Action Against Hunger's business model, and allows us to operate in those 55 plus contacts.
It takes a while to build local capacity, but we feel like we also offer technical expertise that's grounded in history and those lessons learned from other communities that enable us to scale up quickly, to deliver in ways that are effective in a local context. And our technical expertise is something we're quite proud of and has really been a guiding light for the organization since its inception. And so when I imagine what makes our work truly unique, it's the two levers, the humanitarianism, long-term development root cause, addressing the root causes, but underpinning that on a deep and fundamental level is this commitment to innovation and change.
Right now, we hear a lot about Gaza, but where our teams are incredibly effective and the stories aren't broadcast as loudly, are in places like Kenya. We've been operational in Kenya for a long time. Most of our staff are Kenyan or have lived in Kenya for a long time, close to the community. And so they knew in advance that certain areas in which we operate or adjacent to our operations were subject to flooding, catastrophic flooding.
The vast majority are akin to what we experienced in Kenya, flash flooding, catastrophic flooding, that it does immediate damage, but then it might rob the soil of its nutrients. And so we have to work afterwards extra hard to rebuild some of what people have built their livelihoods around in those areas. So that's where having local staff, it's not just a nice talking point, it's mission-critical. It's how we get things done.
Carol Cone:
Absolutely. Yeah. I want to just talk about RUTF, because it's affectionately called Plumpy'Nut. And can you talk a little bit about what's in it and why, it's amazing.
Eric Bebernitz:
Definitely. And I think this leads, the story itself is a terrific segue into the new state of the humanitarian reality because this work has been directly affected. Plumpy'Nut is, it's the brand name for a product based on a combination of a milk product and a peanut paste. And for those who've never seen it before, it's akin to a power bar. It's smooth in texture, and it comes in sort of a little sack that you can administer and travel more rapidly and easily. So that was the whole, that is the innovation right there. Number one, it's fewer ingredients that are more shelf-stable.
Carol Cone:
Exactly.
Eric Bebernitz:
And we're able to, as a result, take it to the furthest reaches of Ethiopia when it's needed or wherever else Action Against Hunger might be working. And this is usually done in concert with other organizations. So Action Against Hunger isn't a manufacturer. We are an implementer of the Plumpy'Nut. So we'll work with, depending on the setting, local governments, the national governments, along with the manufacturers and UN agencies to make sure that the course is in the hands of who needs it the most. And so we like to say for $50, we can administer a course of pumping out to one child and bring them back from the brink, and when I say the brink, I mean quite literally, they are on death's door, to really a place where they're on the path to thriving. And it's really a miracle, right? And it's something that we can get into the hands of mothers, tell the mothers how to use it, and then they can either do it in one of our settings that's managed by us or take it with them and continue to administer.
Carol Cone:
I want to go into the innovations that you're doing because winning Fast Company's Most Innovative Company award, getting on that list is not easy. And I think it would be very surprising to our listeners and our viewers that you've created things like a GPS for goats when you're also on the agricultural side. You're not just about dealing with malnutrition.
Eric Bebernitz:
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And the GPS for goats is by far the most colorful example that when we talk about it, people really latch on, because it's beautiful. What it does in its simplicity, uses sort of satellite technology to help guide herders to the arable land or water points more effectively, especially in a drought situation. So we're able to look from the sky and get it to the people, the information that people need it, and then they drive their herds in the right direction, and that's the primary source of income and sustenance for certain communities. So it feels like a modest innovation, but it has tremendous impact for communities that base their livelihoods around this form of agriculture.
Yeah, it's important work. But the wider point here is that I think people often associate, I think innovation with, especially now, AI, machine learning, LLMs. So there's a couple ways that it can help our work or help a wider sector, and it brings together the public-private partnership side of the work that we do, that beautiful concentric circle between local governments, the private sector, and an implementer like us in ag. So one of the examples we have here of that worked for us is in Zambia and moving from maize and less drought-resistant products to something like cowpeas, which is indigenous to the area. And it's a good food to eat, but also can be brought to market globally to bring income into the community.
I don't want to dismiss AI machine learning and the role of data engineering, because that plays a huge part increasingly in what we do. And the best way to sort of imagine this for everybody is around prevention. So how do we look at modeling and large data sets to say, "Okay, this place is going to be prone to flooding. We need to front load resources in this area in advance or move people out of the area in advance to prevent the worst of a catastrophe happening." These are all advancements in our sector within the, let's say generously, the past 10 years, but really it's taken, it's accelerated in the past few years as this technology becomes more accessible.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Can you also explain the community-run solar-powered vending machine?
Eric Bebernitz:
It is amazing. As you look at the suite of interventions, and when I talk about the basket of interventions, it's to prevent malnutrition and hunger. It's not just about immediate food distribution or Plumpy'Nut, it's also about water and to prevent all the other effects that come with malnutrition or help offset them. We don't want, children tend to end up with diarrhea or dysentery or waterborne illnesses. So how do we do this? We build water points in parts of the world that wouldn't normally have them, and they're set up, we have a machine, the vending machine that you're referencing in Kenya funded by private donors in the United States. And how it works is we give, the community has access to tokens.
It's located within the community, so it's more accessible than having to go out into the bush and find a new source of water or one that might be more dangerous to access. So women and children can participate directly in securing water for the community. You take that token, you put it directly in the machine, and a portion of water, clean water, drinking water comes out. And it's a beautiful thing to see, and it's so simple on a lot of levels, but it really brings together all these different things. How do you bring technology to bear in some of the hardest to reach places, and then how do you give the community what they need? And it's been so successful that we want to build more, of course.
Carol Cone:
Oh, that's great. And how are they funded?
Eric Bebernitz:
In this instance, it's funded by donors and UBS, the bank, who identified, well, working with our country programs, identified this unique need. And so they've given it off to our teams and some of our partners to develop the technology and then place it.
Carol Cone:
And I love the innovative nature of it. It's really great. And I bet that when you create these, that it provides this positive energy and desire within your entire staff and field.
Eric Bebernitz:
It's a beautiful story to be able to tell, and we've taken people, our board members, our council members to see it for themselves, because you met Charles, you know Charles, our CEO. Once you see it, you're transformed. Your life is transformed, because number one, I think the first thing that people from the west often realize in these contexts is just how extreme the situation is. It's truly transformative.
Carol Cone:
And that's wonderful. Now I want to pivot to how you're dealing and addressing with the severance of USAID and the speed of it, and even, as many people have said, the cruelty of it. You've got a lot of resilience, but I'd love you to share how the 45 years, how the commitment to innovation, diversifying of partners around the world has helped you, albeit it's not solved it.
Eric Bebernitz:
Taking the long view here I think is helpful. So your pointing to our legacy, it's important, because that shows that as an organization that's been around, we've navigated multiple challenges. At the end of the day, this is a loss of funding, and we've been there before as an organization and a sector. What makes this unique is the volume of funding we're about for the entire sector. I think everybody at this point realizes that the US government contributed an overwhelming portion of the development in humanitarian assistance that was being distributed by organizations like ours globally. And to have it disappear quite literally overnight under chaotic circumstances was a shock, to say the least.
So other principal funders in the humanitarian development space are cutting their funding for various or similar reasons, the Germans, the UK, the French. A lot of the key players in our space, their funding's going the other direction. And then what I don't think we talk about quite enough is the impact this is going to have on the UN system, the US being one of the primary drivers of funding for the UN system, which includes UNICEF and World Food Program and UNHCR, the humanitarian agency. It's going to have a pretty serious ripple effect that we haven't quite seen yet. For us, Action Against Hunger, we're somewhat unique in that the US government provided an important slice of our financial pie, but not the full. So other organizations had greater percentages of their resources coming from BHA and some of the other agencies within USAID or State Department.
It was about 20% for us. What I'm concerned about now is how do we adapt? We have to assume, at least right now, that no meaningful funding will emerge out of State Department where all of this is housed. Now, it doesn't mean nothing, but we just can't expect it. So we have to find a more sustainable business model that doesn't rely on that source of funding. And what we've done almost immediately here within Action Against Hunger is we leaned into the other parts of our business that were more sustainable and allow us to continue with the innovation we've been talking about and the interventions in a humanitarian setting that are lifesaving and absolutely essential for us to do. When projects are canceled, you sort of in the news hear about the worst, but what it meant for us in a practical level is that our ability to deliver services in Ethiopia stopped overnight.
So individuals that were expecting to receive emergency nutrition, it wasn't there. We had to close doors, we had to lay off the staff involved. Cash stopped almost immediately, and that has an immediate life-saving impact, not even thinking about the soft impacts of people seeing the US government as playing an instrumental role in their communities. This is quite literally life or death. And I know that's been dismissed a little bit in some corners of the internet or media space, but we've seen it. We've seen it happen. We've seen people that have been turned away, in our case, that are hungry or desperate. And in other organizations cases, it takes different forms, but it's immediate and profound.
Carol Cone:
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, "No one has died because of USAID," I mean, I think that that created such a furor around people with just big hearts and the kind of work you do. How did Action Against Hunger answer that in some way to your current donors?
Eric Bebernitz:
Hey, so one of the challenges for Action Against Hunger is that we, by our very nature, are not a political operation. So we are aware of all these comments being made and have our unique perspective from on the ground that was telling us the exact opposite. But our feeling is to sort of let the politicians sort out the aftermath, because our job is to put our heads down and continue to deliver our services in the best way possible. That's our job. And we have to be uniquely careful to ensure that, number one, our staff are safe, and number two, we're able to do the work that we need to do and that we've committed to the communities to do.
Carol Cone:
That's beautiful and very, very smart. I'm also, love to hear from you, again, since you've got the folklore background, one or two stories. I mean, you've been with the organization over five years, one or two that have just touched your heart so much that you like to share when people say, "Hey, Eric, what do you do?"
Eric Bebernitz:
One of those for me is we now have a pretty established partnership with IHG Hotels and Resorts, and myself and the team went to Atlanta to work directly with that team to find out ways to work together to activate that partnership.
And in one of our calls with the team in Atlanta, we got back this wonderful piece of feedback, which was a person from one of their properties in Chicago, contributed directly to Action Against Hunger, and then told them, "I did this because Action Against Hunger was there for me when I needed it the most in the Balkans." And when Action Against Hunger helped them, and now they're in the United States, now they're working for a large prominent company, and move to give back. And you hear that, and that's the full circle. That's what you want. You want to be there when people need it the most, and then find out that it's not just an endless cycle of support, that it set them on a path that brought them to the United States, brought them to a large company, and then put them in a position where they can contribute back to us.
Carol Cone:
That's nice. Beautiful.
Eric Bebernitz:
It was really a beautiful thing for me to hear. The rest, other stories, there's so many that you find so, I've been doing this for a long time, and one of our challenges within the sector is it's not becoming immune and callous to the imagery and the things that come your way, things that don't necessarily make it to the public. And you find ways to navigate it. Still, there are stories that break through and move you. I'm a parent now, and so I see the world in a different way like every other person who has a kid, and we had a video that the team produced about, I think it was a young woman or girl in Somalia or Ethiopia, and the video came my way for approvals and I was watching it with my wife. She was in the room at the same time, and we went through the story of you hear a child crying, the child and its mother came into a feeding center in Ethiopia looking for support in their darkest moment.
And the doctors and the community health workers in Ethiopia were able to administer, again, Plumpy'Nut to a kid. And it's a story that we tell so many times here, but in this particular telling, it was hard to watch. And it's a positive story. You watch this kid come in, you hear the crying, you hear the crying above all else in a quiet space, and it's unnerving. It moves you. It moves you as a parent. You imagine your child there, and through Action Against Hunger, she came through. She was revived, looked healthy. Her skin was clear. It was amazing to see. And this was all done in a cut-out video, one-minute long effective story for us. But sometimes, I guess my point here is that it's those sort of mundane stories find a way to grab you sometimes. Mundane in the sense that Action Against Hunger see these all the time, thousands of them all over the world all the time, but through effective storytelling, they break through. And they broke through for me for my own reasons, but we know they break through others too.
Carol Cone:
Beautiful. Thank you. So this has been a phenomenal conversation, and I know that we have some of our listeners and viewers who say, "I want a job like Eric's." I really, you're using all parts of your head, your heart, your hands, et cetera. You're deeply involved. What's your recommendation to a young person, they're getting their degree, bachelor's or a community college, or they're working for NGOs, they haven't gotten a degree. What's the trajectory? What should they be focusing on?
Eric Bebernitz:
That's a great question. For my role in particular, I might have one answer. For the sector, I probably have another.
Carol Cone:
You could do both.
Eric Bebernitz:
For the sector, I'll start there. My advice to young folks or grads or those who are in a position to do this is to work internationally. Find a way to be there on the ground in a challenging context, not to parachute in or sort of be the passive onlooker, but to experience it, to see what it's like to build your capacity to be empathetic. It's important, and it's also important for if you're going to build your knowledge base from there. I would say start there.
For my line of work, there's so many different paths to get to where people probably want to go. But what I often say to our junior staff in particular that come in is, "Look elsewhere." Can you try within a foundation, can you become a program officer within a foundation and help allocate resources, not just Action Against Hunger, but to the wider sector to help make change?
What about B corps and sort of the CSR teams? There's different ways to have an impact. And you can always come back to an Action Against Hunger with that expertise, and we'll be there for it, or IRC or Save the Children. There's lots of organizations that do great work that people can engage in, but that's it. I find that my advice, especially early career, is just gain the experience in the way that-
Carol Cone:
Gain it. Yeah, that's what I say. Yeah, for sure. I always like to give the mic over to my guest, and something that we haven't covered or something you want to reiterate as we have to end this wonderful conversation?
Eric Bebernitz:
I think we right now are uniquely focused. Humanity is uniquely focused, North Americans, Americans, people in New York, on what's not working. I hope that we've given examples here of what is working or what has the potential to work better, and that I want in my own modest way to find a different way of seeing the world that's proactive, constructive, and more driven by hope. Not sort of toxic levels of hope, but to see a path forward where anyone can play a direct role in improving, whether it's their neighborhood community, or wider country, that it is possible and that we work in contexts where it takes a modest investment to have a market improvement on people's lives. We see it all the time. We take it for granted.
I want others to see that too, and I want people to see it in their community, whether Los Angeles or Chicago or Nairobi. See that and then be inspired by it and work towards it. That's really the most meaningful thing for me right now, because we can go down a rabbit hole reading about the current administration or whatever else might be stressing people out, whether it's the state of the economy, the cost of food. There's lots of things that aren't working, but there are also an extraordinary volume of things that are working well and that we can continue to do better and that if we're able to reorient a little bit throughout the day to focusing on those things, I think we would all be in a better place.
Carol Cone:
That's wonderful. I mean, we need to have hope. We need to use our smarts. We need to be collaborative, co-create and such because there are solutions all around us. We just have to discover them, find them, apply them.
Eric Bebernitz:
Definitely.
Carol Cone:
So thank you, Eric Bebernitz. This has been an extraordinary, as good as the conversation is with Charles that we had four years ago. So in a whole different way, thank you for all your great work and your commitment and the work that Action Against Hunger is doing. Thank you so much for joining us on Purpose 360.
Eric Bebernitz:
Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for all the great work that you do to elevate similar thinkers and people doing great work.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone on Purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Aug 14, 2025 - view latest version here.
p360_208 RAW (Completed 08/14/25)
Transcript by Rev.com
Page 1 of 2