Profile

Respect and Diplomacy: A Career in Service to America

Harden’s career started when he joined the U.S. Peace Corps, serving as a secondary school teacher in Chobe District in northern Botswana. Working in a rural village, he learned to treat everyone with respect, regardless of language or tribe; respect for others regardless of different backgrounds or opinions has continued to ground his work over the decades. “I loved the Peace Corps,” Harden states, crediting his Peace Corps service as kickstarting his international career “in service to America.” 

Dave Harden teaching during Peace Corps 

After Peace Corps Harden attended graduate school, earning an M.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from Georgetown University, followed by a longstanding career in the Foreign Service. His work overseas included over a decade working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), primarily in the Middle East (Libya, Iraq, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen), as well as a stint serving as Senior Advisor to the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. In 2016 he was nominated by President Obama to serve as Assistant Administrator of USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, where he led the U.S. response to crises around the world. In 2019, upon retiring from the Foreign Service, President Trump awarded Harden the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service. His foreign service work transcended Democratic and Republican administrations; bipartisanship is a necessity of diplomatic work but may be indicative of how Harden would tackle wide-ranging, complex challenges such as climate change if elected to Congress.

Harden credits his overseas work with enabling him to work with different people around the world, as well as with Americans regardless of party affiliation. “I represented America,” Harden declares.  He hopes to apply his critical diplomatic skills to transcend the polarization gripping Congress, and work across the political divide. His overseas diplomatic track record is hitting the ground in Maryland as well; his Congressional campaign has received support from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump supporters, and everyone in between.  Perhaps Peace Corps and international development work - where accomplishments are dependent on listening to, learning from, and respecting local people – will be the secret to his success should he win his congressional race.                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Climate Change: National Security Risk and Economic Engine for the Future

One of Harden’s key campaign priorities centers around climate change - both the necessity of addressing it and harnessing the opportunities it brings. At USAID Harden witnessed the effects of climate change as he helped lead the U.S. response to global crises. This included humanitarian crises, many of which are exacerbated by climate change. He cites Syria and Yemen as examples where climate and conflict are correlated: In both countries drought and limited water aggravated grievances, displacement, and ultimately conflict and civil war. The risk of climate-affected crises and conflicts may get worse as increased heat and humidity affect large swaths of humanity in South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa.  “These conditions are incompatible with human existence,” warns Harden. Yet his dire warning about the costs of climate change and its impact on humanity comes with the realist acknowledgement that, “rich people in rich countries can manage climate change better than poor people in poor countries.”

That said, “we’re not without risk in the U.S.,” states Harden. He has stated that climate change is a national security risk, and cites the disruptive effects of climate change in America, including on the economy, unemployment, and infrastructure. He also offers examples closer to home, such as land loss in Dorchester County, Maryland.  Yet Harden’s dire warnings about the cost of climate change to America and everyday people comes with an excitement about the opportunities it brings. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a climate change believer or skeptic. Capital markets, climate, and technology have made the decision to move to climate solutions,” declares Harden.  

Climate Solutions: A National and Global Imperative

Harden contrasts climate change disruption and a bleak future with one filled with climate solutions and promise.  For Harden, technology to address climate challenges is a bold pathway to a better future where Maryland can seize the future, and America more broadly can secure our leadership role in the world. To achieve this Harden cites the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate (ARPA-C), a working group recently launched by the Biden administration to accelerate research and development in climate change technologies. According to the White House, ARPA-C will, “foster affordable, game-changing technologies that can help America achieve the President’s goal of net zero economy-wide emissions by 2050.”  Harden likened ARPA-C to the modern version of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and its development of breakthrough technology during the Cold War that helped facilitate America’s rise in global power.  In Harden’s view, seizing climate solutions and their technological innovations is critical for ensuring US leadership and standing in the global hierarchy.

According to Harden, climate solutions can greatly benefit not only the country, but highly vulnerable places like the Eastern Shore in Maryland, where he wants to see significant investments in climate innovation, technology, and infrastructure. Harden views investments in climate solutions as an economic engine, with plans for his District to serve as an accelerator and incubator - and ideally national role model - for developing, building, and trading climate solutions to the world, while simultaneously reinvigorating rural communities and economies like his in Maryland. “We have a choice: we build it and sell it to the world, or we buy it from others who do,” says Harden in a matter-of-fact manner. He sums up what’s at stake succinctly: the countries who embrace and advance climate solutions will be “the winners for the next century.”

Dave Harden working in South Sudan

Running for Congress: Listening to Locals

Harden aims to leverage what he learned overseas in his run for Congress as a Democratic candidate for Maryland’s First District. His time at USAID built on the principles he learned during Peace Corps, including respect for others and the importance of working with locals. “We learned overseas that you can’t ignore locals…without locals there is no success.” 

Domestically, Harden prides himself on listening to his District’s locals, including rural constituents and working-class people. He sums up his Congressional priorities as responding to what Americans want: “A fair deal.”  Harden’s fair deal includes a representative and fair democratic system where people can vote; an economy that offers not “handouts but a hand up” through investment, technology, and rural development; and opportunities that promote equality and inclusion. Key to realizing any of these goals is the ability to transcend polarized politics. Harden’s career, from Peace Corps to Foreign Service and the awareness and skills sets they provided, may be just what is needed to move his agenda forward.

Supporting Peace Corps

If Harden wins his congressional race, he will be joining a small minority of RPCVs who have served in Congress (currently John Garamendi (D-CA) is the only RPCV in the House of Representatives). He pledges to support Peace Corps through funding, visiting volunteers, and holding a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting to ensure Peace Corps Volunteers get what they need to be effective in their communities.  Harden also offered to have Peace Corps volunteers over for dinner…which in the end may earn him supporters both within and beyond Maryland. He invites RPCVs to connect with him and his campaign, and if you’re lucky you just might get that dinner invite. 

Dave Harden in South Sudan for USAID

Meredith Miller Vostrejs (RPCV St. Vincent & Grenadines 1995-97) is the RPCV4EA Newsletter Editor. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, who she met in the Peace Corps, and their two teens. She works in the field of global health, which is increasingly impacted by changes to the environment.

* Author’s Note:  You can hear Dave Harden on September 25^th during the Peace Corps Connect 2021 Conference, where he will be on the panel Climate Change and Migration: policies, people and proposed solutions, sponsored by RPCVs for Environmental Action (RPCV4EA) and the Peace Corps Community for Refugees (PCC4R). More details about the conference and registration info can be found here.

By Maureen Smith Martindale

Seven months into her Peace Corps service in Niger, Lisa Curtis had just hatched a plan to help village women sell moringa, a green even more nutritious than kale, but then came the unthinkable: a terrorist attack.

The 2011 attack included the kidnapping and murder of two French men, led to evacuation of all 98 Peace Corps volunteers from Niger, and brought her plan to an abrupt halt. At least so she thought. She left, and eventually returned to Oakland, California, her childhood home. 

“I kept thinking about Niger and the plant. I felt like I had been given so much by that community, but like I didn’t give anything back,” she said. “I was shopping with my mom at a Whole Foods. In the U.S. we love all our superfoods. Nobody used to know what chia seeds were, why not moringa?”  

Several years later after spending many weekends creating and selling moringa product samples, Lisa Curtis founded and became CEO of Kuli Kuli Foods, a company that sells moringa products. The company has expanded from moringa powders and energy bars to teas, smoothie mixes, and soon, various flavors of dark chocolate bark. In 2018, Curtis was featured in the Forbes list of 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.

Since it began, Kuli Kuli Foods has paid more than $5 million to small farmers and planted more than 24 million trees in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a B-corporation, it meets high social and environmental standards. It also relies on organic, regenerative agriculture, and a recent study showed it is likely carbon neutral. 

I asked Curtis to tell her story, from her days as a community development volunteer in Niger up to the present. 

Q. Can you describe your Peace Corps service and how you first came across the moringa tree?   

A. I was actually a municipal and community development volunteer in Niger.  Like a lot of Peace Corps volunteers, I did a needs assessment, and I ended up helping out at my village’s health center. One of the things I started doing was measuring the upper arms of babies to tell how malnourished they were and recording that data. I’m a vegetarian, and I was just basically eating a lot of millet and rice.  It was a diet that left me pretty tired.  I was asking the nurses, what can I eat to give me more energy?  They literally pulled these leaves off of trees nearby.  I had never heard of moringa.

Q. What was the biggest factor that motivated you to market moringa in the United States?  

A. It seemed like an amazing plant.  I went from my village to a nearby city and did a bunch of research. This tree is incredible--it grows all over the tropics. It’s one of the most nutritious plants in the world. I started asking some of the women in my village, how can we grow more of this plant? They said, we’re not going to grow a crop we can’t sell, so why don’t you help sell it? That was the original plan. I was putting the final touches on the plan when we got evacuated. 

Q. Where does the name Kuli Kuli come from? 

A. It’s a peanut snack. They mix it with moringa. They separate peanut oil from resin or powder, make them into peanut balls and mix with moringa and cook. The kuli kuli snacks are crunchy on the outside, and chewy on the inside.  I thought, why don’t we use that same idea and create products in the U.S.? 

Q. Prior to Peace Corps, did you have a marketing background, and did you ever envision yourself starting your own company?  

A. I was a politics and environmental studies major in college and joined Peace Corps right after college. The thing I knew was the American market, and that it could be an asset for small African farmers. I thought I could help them unlock it. It’s been eleven years. It’s been quite the journey, a kind of learning under fire. 

Q. What were the biggest deterrents in forming your own company here to market moringa?  

A. Probably the biggest challenge I had was getting anyone to take me seriously. I was 23 years old. A lot of people told me, you have no business experience, and you’re trying to do something that’s fundamentally hard, with a new product, sourced with women farmers in Africa. I pitched to a ton of people, a ton of investors, to try to get this idea off the ground. Ninety-nine percent of them said, no, this is too crazy.  

Curtis samples moringa at an organic farm in Nicaragua in 2016.

Q. How did you get the company off the ground in the beginning?  

A. I ended up starting really, really small. I got a few of my childhood friends together to start a side project with me. Nights and weekends I spent building Kuli Kuli. Initially I just wanted to test the idea, to see if I could get Americans to eat moringa products. Instead of peanuts, we used almonds, and made moringa energy bars.  Basically, we would spend all of Saturday in a commercial kitchen making these bars by hand and then spend Sundays selling them in farmers markets.  

Q. What benefits is the company providing to women farmers?   

A. We have an impact page, a full summary, our 2020 impact report.  We source from small farmers primarily on the African continent, and also some from other places like Mexico and Cambodia. We evaluate all our suppliers. There are over 3,000 farmers. We’ve put over $5 million directly in the hands of small farmers through moringa purchases. We’ve been able to plant over 24 million trees. 

Q. Did you explore the possibility of forming a nonprofit rather than for-profit corporation?

A. I saw a lot of nonprofits come and go in Niger, and funding ran out. Why not try to build something that can sustain itself, that’s not reliant on outside grant funding, kind of a market-based solution? After Peace Corps instead of coming straight home, I ended up staying and working in India for five months for this social impact investment firm. That really was what opened my eyes to social enterprise. I worked at a social enterprise for about three years, trying to figure out how to do Kuli Kuli on the side. 

Q. How is the rest of the company structured in developing countries? Your web site mentions trade, not aid. 

A. They are their own organizations, generally social enterprises or non-profits started by people from there to support sustainable farming. They also sell moringa locally and that’s something we really encourage. We want people there to sell and benefit from moringa. We’ve sponsored school feeding programs, like adding it to the kids’ porridge, doing a lot of nutritional education . . . cooking classes, showing people how you can add moringa powder to different local dishes. . . and fresh leaves cooked into sauces. 

Curtis and colleagues meet with women moringa farmers at a USAID project in Niger in 2018.

Q. Do the products you sell have fair trade status? 

A. There isn’t yet a fair trade certification for moringa, unlike chocolate or coffee where there’s an established fair trade certification process. It’s about $20,000 per group to invest in fair trade certification. We work with many different groups. We do follow fair trade practices. We’re sourcing directly from many small farmers. We visit them, we talk to them all the time. We do pay quite a bit above the local average wage. And we try to really invest in the communities we source from and support them in other ways.    

Q. Your company now has U.S. staff.  Do you ever feel frustration that living wages here are based on a much higher standard of living than that of farmers in developing countries?   

A. It’s a huge gap, and that’s part of the reason why we pay above market and why we think it’s so important to be investing directly with small farmers. We can pay more and get it directly into their hands. Many of the farmers are getting three or four times more than they would get selling other crops. Moringa is also very easy to grow, low maintenance and low water. 

Q. You mentioned a study showing that the company is likely carbon neutral because of all the moringa trees planted?  Can you also talk about other environmentally friendly practices? 

A. We haven’t had a full-on third party audit, but we worked with a team at UC Berkeley that does carbon analyses. Their calculation was because we were planting so many moringa trees in sustainable ways, we were likely carbon neutral.  What was the biggest use of carbon? I thought it would be shipping containers full of moringa going from Uganda to California. It ended up being the packaging. We have just switched our pure moringa line to post-consumer recycled plastic, so about 30 percent to 50 percent of the bag is now made with recycled plastic. It saves the equivalent of 40,000 water bottles per year. And 100 percent of our moringa is certified organic. We provide free financing to achieve organic status. One farmer has powered his entire facility with solar.  A lot of them are using solar powered dryers to make the moringa powder.  

Q. Is there anything else you would like to tell me? 

A. The last thing we just launched we’re really excited about is our superbark--a dark chocolate superfood snack, flavored with baobab, hibiscus and breadfruit. These different flavors have environmental and social impacts as well, since we are using more specialty crops. We’re hoping there’s a market for those in the same way we’ve built the market for moringa.

For more information, visit www.kulikulifoods.com. 

Maureen Smith Martindale is a journalist and former Peace Corps volunteer who served in Cameroon from 1987 to 1989.