Terry Deckard has pulled off more than one career change.
A divorce spurred her to move up the corporate ladder from part-time bookkeeper in the early 1980s to certified public accountant and managing partner in an accounting firm.
Twenty years later, a mission trip to Africa prompted Deckard to sell off her stake in that partnership, leave the corporate world and raise money to fund micro-businesses in the African nations of Malawi, Kenya and Zimbabwe, among other places.
Deckard recently spoke with reporter Lynn Cook about giving and getting.
Excerpts:
Q: You sold out of your partnership to help start Exodus Force Initiative with your friend Constance Zehner. What's the group's purpose?
A: This is about breaking the cycles of poverty and famine by building sustainable economies. We work to set up chicken and vegetable farms with water wells for irrigation so people can plant all year whether it rains or not. A lot of the time this is the only clean water around. The alternative for these people is often walking a couple of miles to the river, and even then, the water isn't good.
It's been so amazing to see lives transforming. Things that we take for granted, an amount that can seem modest to us, can completely change things for them.
One of the farms we helped fund in South Africa, which is run by 20 ladies, won farm of the year for their district, and they got $28,000 in prize money, which is just huge for them.
Q: How much does it take to start one of these farms?
A: Every project is different. The first we started completely on our own is half a hectare in Zimbabwe and cost about $40,000. That's roughly the size of a football field, and that's buying the land, drilling the well, building a caretaker's house and chicken coup, and securing the first round of seeds.
We drilled the well in December 2006, seeded last April, and they had a first crop by July. Four thousand onions, big as grapefruit. These farms raise everything — cabbage, squash, beets, corn, you name it.
It runs very much like a village coop. The farm feeds the workers and the elderly and widows in the community. The rest goes to market. Ten percent of the returns are tithed, and the remaining 90 percent is half paid out to the workers and half used to buy seed and fund a maintenance account.
It's sustainable already. We have an amazing story to tell because there are people managing their livelihoods today who would be starving to death if this wasn't available to them.
Q: So what's next for EFI?
A: We've helped financially support farms in South Africa by partnering with TEND, an organization with lots of this kind of experience that trains people to farm and manage. We plan to partner with them more.
We have the president's blessing in Malawi for four large farming projects, but we're not funded for that yet. It would be huge — bigger farms, each divided into 200 plots for 200 families. There would be one in each of the geographical regions because, politically, you need to do it that way.
Q: What's the response been to this work in Africa?A: It's mixed, frankly. Half and half, I'd say. Some people get it immediately — you can see it in their faces. Others just aren't that excited by it. In some ways it's been very hard ground. This was a big leap of faith for me. But when you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, you feel that peace even with the struggles and challenges.
