Driven by optimism

SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:

Aug.

21, 1950, in Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Occupation:

president and chief executive officer of Heifer International

My most vivid childhood memory

is firing a rifle at an antelope and hitting it, then later eating it.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is

life is impermanent.

The best thing about heading Heifer International is

being in solidarity with amazing people all over the world.

The most challenging thing about heading Heifer International is

how to move faster.

The person I most admire is

Mohandas Gandhi.

What I’d most like to be remembered for is

an examined life.

What I like best so far about Arkansas is

the magnificent Arkansas River.

My pet peeve is

still getting peeved at things.

The place I haven’t yet been that I’d most like to visit is

Antarctica.

My biggest regret in life is

not being a golf pro.

I relax by

practicing my golf.

My golf handicap is

chaotic.

My favorite Ben & Jerry’s icecream flavor is

Cherry Garcia.

Two words to describe myself:

Edge-dwellingPierre Ferrari’s good-humored wife, Kim, calls him “Pierre From Everywhere.”

Six decades and millions of miles since he was born in the Belgian Congo, a colonial name since wiped from the map, Ferrari first set foot in Arkansas two years ago to be hired as president and chief executive officer of Heifer International.

Educated in the Belgian Congo, Belgium, Kenya, England and the United States, the globe-girdling executive estimates he now spends 75 percent of the time on the road for Heifer.

He’s steering important changes at the nonprofit entity, renowned for its focus since 1944 on reducing hunger and poverty around the planet, mainly through donations of livestock to small farmers.

“Since I’ve arrived, we’ve been doing this major evolution,” Ferrari says. As he explains in the agency’s latest annual report, “Heifer has vowed to scale up its program impact as its No. 1 priority. Using the same family-oriented, community-based development model, we will support our smallholder farmers to move from providing for themselves to feeding the world.”

A recent visit to projects in India, Nepal, Cambodia and Thailand further sparked Ferrari’s enthusiasm for the ongoing expansion of Heifer’s mission, just two yearsafter the U.S. recession forced staff layoffs at its Little Rock headquarters and elsewhere.

“We’re asking more skills and capacity of our staff in these incredibly poor settings,” he says.

“And what’s really been pleasing in the early stages is the level of innovation and cleverness they’re bringing to the idea of working successfully with 10,000 or 20,000 farmers.

That’s very different from working with 100 farmers.”

Brought up as a city kid in the southern Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga region, Ferrari gained early exposure to rural poverty through a grandmother.

“She was a very devout Catholic and also a very good businesswoman,” he says. “She had a wholesale vegetable business, contracting with villagers for the produce she needed.

My younger sister, Danielle, and I would go outwith her to the villages, where many people were in wretched straits. You don’t have to be a development specialist to know what poverty looks like.”

Ferrari’s parents were both born in the Belgian Congo. His father, Eddie, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, became the Coca-Cola bottler in Elizabethville. His mother, Huby, was the daughter of Belgian colonial administrators.

Pierre was a fourthgrader in 1960 when Belgium granted the sprawling Congo its independence. Civil war quickly followed. In the face of growing and unpredictable turmoil, his father first sent the rest of the family to stay with relatives in Brussels, then joined them.

This refugee experience helped shape Ferrari’s outlook in ways that he sees resonating today.

“The first lesson from any kind of experience like my family had is a sense of impermanence andvulnerability,” he says. “It’s a sense that anything can change so rapidly. It’s astonishing how quickly things can change. So you have to be adaptable. You have to be resilient. At the same time, I was left with a sense of openness and freedom that continues to help me see the world as a very real and complex place.”

BACK TO AFRICA

After a year in Brussels, the family returned to Africa, where Ferrari’s father had taken a job in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Pierre, who went to junior high school there for two years, again saw pervasive poverty.

“We lived a comfortable life,” he remembers. “We had a house, a car, clothes, all those basics. But you could ride a few miles and you were in a village with mud huts, no electricity and women carrying water on their heads.”

His parents decided that high schools in Kenya weren’t rigorous enough, so he and his sister were sent to England. There he attended St. George’s, a Catholic boarding school outside London.

“England was wet and rainy compared to my boyhood home, but I did enjoy my boarding-school experience,” he says. “The school had great academic requirements. It was very oriented toward getting boys into Cambridge or Oxford.

“They got me into Cambridge, where I took a degree in economics. When I look back at what I studied there, it was in preparation for an academic career. I could have been a don [professor]. I didn’t know anything about the real world of commerce.”

A friend advised Ferrari to get a master’s degree in business, which sent him across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Back then, in the early ’70s, the only MBA schools of any note were at American universities,” he says. “The friend told me, ‘Well, there’s Harvard or Stanford.’ I applied to both and got admitted. But both said, ‘Go work for a couple of years and then come back.’ I accepted Harvard and then went to Africa to work.”

Through his father’s connections, he joined Coca-Cola in Johannesburg for a job that took him all over Africa.When he returned to Harvard to earn the MBA, it was with no intention of going back to the soft-drink giant.

“But I fell in love with an American woman,” he says. “Before that, I was going to return to Europe and work in Paris. I had job offers in Paris. And I thought it would be a wonderful city to live in. But once I fell in love, I said, ‘OK, I’ll go to work again in the beverage industry.’”

Settled in Atlanta in 1976, Ferrari and his first wife had two sons, Peter, now 32, and Oliver, 30. Ferrari worked for Coca-Cola’s wine division, then served as president successively for Cinzano North America and the wine importer Frederick Wildman and Sons, before taking the senior vice president’s post at Buckingham-Wile wine and liquor importers.

SHIFTING POINT OF VIEW

In 1988, he became senior vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola Foods, three years later assuming the same position for Coca-Cola USA. He’d become a high-powered and high-paid executive, buthis mindset was shifting.

“I enjoyed my work for Coca-Cola,” he says. “But there was a nagging question that kept surfacing. Throughout my life, there has always been a mental conversation about the spiritual dimension of human existence. I’m not really talking about religion, but more of, ‘Where am I on the planet?’”

Those thoughts crystallized as his sons were reaching adolescence in Atlanta.

“I always had some concerns about the aggressiveness with which we were marketing sugared soft drinks,” he says. “Both my first wife and I were feeling a little uncomfortable about our children having easy access to Coca-Cola all the time.”

Then came a confrontation with his older son:

“Peter was maybe 14, and I said to him one day, ‘Stop drinking so much cola.’ He said to me, ‘How can you tellme not to drink Coke? Pushing Coke is what you do every day.’ That was a moment of epiphany, where you stop and say, ‘Gee, what am I doing ?’From there, it cascaded into a whole series of changes.”

He happened to be on the funding board at the global nonprofit agency CARE, whose president and CEO Philip Johnston asked him to come aboard as special assistant in 1995.

“I said, ‘OK, this sounds good - working full time to fight poverty,’” Ferrari says. “I took a huge pay cut. My wife asked, ‘You sure about this?’ It was a stimulating job. I went all over the world. I set up the first CARE program in the United States, in Boston.”

The three years with CARE were a prelude of sorts to his current position, “although the big difference with Heifer is that it is very much centered on community-based holistic work, while CARE does a wide range of services. At Heifer, we have this one dimension, where we teach small farmers how to improve their lives. Thatis our competence.”

Citing the vast number of small farmers, some 650 million worldwide, he emphasizes that “we are expanding notonly the number of farmers Heifer works with, but also expanding their production so that the world can be fed. The food has got to be grown in proximity to where the hungry people are.”

THE DIM SUM LIFE

Leaving CARE in 1998, Ferrari entered “what a good friend called ‘the dim sum life’ - a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I really was Pierre From Everywhere.”

Still living in Atlanta, he did a variety of venture-capital and nonprofit work, “while trying to improve my golf. I went all over the world, a lot to the Orient: Korea, Japan, China.” He became friends with the owners of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, a Vermont-based business known for its social conscience. Atone point, he served as Ben & Jerry’s board chairman, and he remains on the board.

Having divorced, he met artist-designer second wife Kim while both were working on a project leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Her daughters, Olivia and Elsa Stallings, have become part of his family.

“I loved the dim sum life,” he says. “But for Kim, our lives were getting a bit incoherent and complicated. She said, ‘You ought to do one thing. You’re going to turn 60. You ought to find one specific thing to do and get it done.’ I thought, ‘Well, that certainly makes sense.’”

Then, “literally days after we made the decision that I was going to find something steady, this Heifer job came up. A friend told me about it. ‘You should apply for it,’ he said. ‘It’s very interesting.’ I went online and sent in a letter with my resume. And here I am. Sometimes things just work out.”

When he applied, Ferrari didn’t know Jo Luck, his longtime predecessor at Heifer, nor anyone else in Arkansas.His slight acquaintance with Heifer, he says, “came from my step-daughters’ work with them through programs at their Montessori school. My familiarity was to pay for all the Heifer books and materials they were buying.”

Ferrari appears to have made a stellar impression in his two years on the job.

Doug Smith, chairman of Heifer International’s board of directors, says Ferrari “hit the ground running and has begun to take our organization to new heights that the board aspired to but didn’t expect to reach so quickly.”

Smith, executive director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at the Virginia-based Montpelier Foundation, has been especially impressed “with Pierre’s integrity. He approaches every situation thinking hard about what is the right thing to do that will have the greatestpositive impact.”

Arlene Withers, a Heifer board member who also served on the search committee that recommended his hiring, says Ferrari is more than measuring up to expectations.

“He’s doing a terrific job,” says Withers, chief administrator and legal officer for the California-based Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans. “He is leading Heifer into new areas of focus that provide greater impact at a time when charitable giving is more competitive. His extensive international background is a genuine asset.”

Now renting a condominium in the River Market neighborhood, Ferrari says that given his extensive travel for Heifer, “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to arrive at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport and be home in a few minutes. I like visiting the glamorous big cities,but I love to come back to my condo and my friends. It’s so peaceful here.”

A recreational golfer, he has compliments for the courses here, Rebsamen being his favorite so far. Enjoying his other favorite sport is more of a challenge, since “there’s no place to play squash around here.” An avid hiker, he has scaled Pinnacle Mountain “twice in the summer’s high heat, and it was hard.”

Both his parents are still living in Brussels. He and his father are planning to return to the Congo and their native city, now called Lubumbashi, later this year or early in 2013. It would be their first visit since 1961, to a spot he considers safe despite the ongoing civil war in other parts of that tormented nation.

“My father, who is 88, isin very good health,” he says. “He would like to go back to pay homage to all the places he remembers.”

SEEDS OF CHANGE

Closer to home, Ferrari is enthusiastic about Heifer’s new domestic Seeds of Change initiative involving small farmers in the Arkansas Delta and Appalachia. The first Arkansas program is being organized around Hughes.

“These nearby challenges are the same as overseas,” he says. “Deep rural poverty, with poor training and education, but opportunities to connect local farmers with markets so they can grow their own food, organize for commerce and service the market to gain income.”

Ferrari also is working to broaden Heifer’s fundraising beyond its traditional focus on end-of-year giving.

“Our fund drives based on donations for the yearend holidays have been very successful,” he says. “But it has created what I call ‘the Champagne problem.’ Just as Champagne makers do so much of their business over Christmas and New Year’s, Heifer has been getting almost all our donations in a brief window of time. We are trying to spread our revenues year-round, while also seeking new revenue streams.”

Ardyth Neill, president of Heifer Foundation, the agency’s fundraising partner, praises Ferrari as “a good listener, supportive and very passionate about our joint mission to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth.Since he joined Heifer International, he has challenged all of us to utilize our successful programs and evaluate how we may give them more impact while remembering our organizational values.”

With active programs in 31 countries, Heifer helped nearly 2 million farm families last year, building on a track record that has aided 13.6 million families in more than 125 nations since 1944.

On Ferrari’s recent visit to four Asian countries, “our local teams took us to where the projects are, as they always do. And it always takes two or three hours of unbelievably difficult driving to find them. I sometimes ask, ‘How did you find these people? How did you know they were here?’ Of course, they know.”

In a world where thousands of children die each day from causes related to malnutrition, Ferrari’s jobwith Heifer regularly reminds him that “being really poor is amazingly hard.

“We relatively comfortable North Americans probably could not survive one whole week in that kind of poverty. It is tough and stressful and difficult. Literally, most of the communities we work with do not know for sure where their next meal is coming from. Imagine that.”

But he is buoyed by “an enduring belief in people’s entrepreneurial energy. There is this amazingly optimistic energy in humankind, and Heifer can help propel that energy.”