By Eliza Ridgeway
Hidden Villa seeks to strengthen its bottom line and its promotion of food ethics and education through a new partnership with Heifer International, an Arkansas-based non-profit whose goal is to help end world hunger and poverty through self-reliance and sustainability.
Heifer International is set to lease 10 acres of Hidden Villa’s Los Altos Hills nature preserve, and use the land to construct an educational village depicting homes and food economies from around the globe. The lease represents one part of Hidden Villa’s efforts to recover from budget over-runs.
“We continue to move to the model of a more sustainable financial situation for ourselves,” said Hidden Villa Executive Director Chris Overington, predicting that the organization would achieve a balanced budget this year.
In 2004-2005, Hidden Villa ran a $340,000 deficit and made the controversial decision, later reversed, to cancel its popular summer camp. At the time, the board reported that while fundraising had remained static, expenses had risen. During the past five years, Hidden Villa has faced a reduction in reserves from $2 million to $1.75 million. In contrast, the 2008 expense budget rose to $2.4 million, compared with $2.1 million in 2002.
In search of a new financial model, the board has sought to build the endowment through a land sale or lease. Hidden Villa land comprises 1,550 acres restricted by easements and 50 unencumbered acres valued at approximately $20 million.
The planned Heifer village site, known at Hidden Villa as “the knoll,” sits to the west of the preserve’s main parking lot.
According to Jill Kilty Newburn, manager for the planned center, Heifer will pay a lease of “fairly fair-market value.” Neither she nor Overington disclosed the lease amount.
The two non-profits have a longstanding connection – one of the early animals donated through Heifer International in 1946 was Buttercup the cow, sent by Hidden Villa founders Josephine and Frank Duveneck to post-World War II Poland.
Overington said he expects Heifer’s focus on alleviating hunger in impoverished communities to dovetail with Hidden Villa’s farm and food curricula. Students could overlap between the two programs, graduating from one non-profit to the other.
“In the perfect world, a child comes out at 5 (years old) and does a farm tour, comes back with a school group at 9, does an overnight at 12 and does Heifer at 15,” he said. “You learn as a younger person about where food comes from, what it takes to grow, and as you get to an age where you can look more globally, start taking concepts of social justice and food distribution, such as access to resources and how are they disproportionate.”
Newburn said that Heifer is planning a green, independently powered program building and five village sites for experiential education, with anticipated construction costs of approximately $450,000. She expects the site to open in April 2009.
The village sites would re-create households, garden plots and kitchens from communities around the world where Heifer works, including Mozambique, Guatemala, Thailand, the Mississippi Delta region of the United States and a non-country-specific “urban slum.” Heifer operates two similar villages in Arkansas and Massachusetts.
Newburn said the experience of gathering resources, preparing food and spending the night in new settings can allow students “to have some thought-provoking experiences about the privileges we have here (in the Bay Area).”
Contact Eliza Ridgeway at elizar@latc.com.
