Heifer Project

THE HEIFER PROJECT International (HPI) is a privately funded relief agency that reports having impacted the poor in 128 nations over the last 60 years by providing impoverished families with livestock and other domesticated animals.

HPI's philosophy was first envisioned by its founder, Ohio farmer Dan West, who served in 1937 and 1938 as a relief worker during the Spanish Civil War. There he directed a Brethren, Quaker, and Mennonite feeding program, providing children with powdered milk from Holland, fortified with cod liver oil. He was ladling out rations of milk to hungry children, he would write later, when he realized, “These children don’t need a cup, they need a cow.”

Returning home, West explained his dream to his home church, where several farmers donated heifers, cattle feed, and cattle care. The first cow was christened “Faith” and the next two “Hope” and “Charity.” The only requirement of the poor family receiving a young female bovine was that they would donate their first female calf to another poor family, passing the gift along.

Refining the concept, West persuaded leaders from the three church groups’ national leadership to participate in sending to poverty areas young dairy cows that had been bred and were due to calve in a few months. The cow would give milk for several years. Her female or heifer calves would also furnish milk, and her male or bull calves could be used for breeding or butchered to furnish protein.

In 1944 the first shipment of 17 pregnant heifers left York, Pennsylvania, going to families with malnourished children in Puerto Rico. In subsequent years, HPI also donated chickens, pigs, oxen, water buffalo, honeybees, llamas, frogs, and rabbits to low-income, rural people.

The program's emphasis on animals as “capital assets” has garnered critics in the animal rights community. Jennifer O’Connor of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), stated, “I applaud their efforts to help families who wouldn’t have enough to eat otherwise but the land each cow grazes on could be used to feed 100 people if they were growing vegeta-bles”—an assertion that, particularly at HPI, prompts rebuttal.

In 2004, HPI's annual contributions were reported at $69 million with assets of $54 million and a budget of $59 million. Now based in Little Rock, Arkansas, HPI remains faith-based, with funding and board directors drawn from the national leadership of the Church of the Brethren, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Relief and Development, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Division for Global Mission, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Presbyterian Hunger Program, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

HPI says that its “most fundamental principles” are “Heifer's Cornerstones for Just and Sustainable Development,” which for more than 60 years have served to “light the way for people who are on the road to self-reliance.” Those cornerstones form an acronym: PASSING on the GIFTS, which stands for:

P: Passing on the gift allows families and individuals who have received animals to be donors themselves. This spirit of goodwill ripples through the community as animals are passed on and bonds are formed in a group effort to better their own lives.

...