Florence Reed Biography
Envoronmental Activist for Sustainable Farming and Rain Forest Protection. b. 1968.
"A farmer in a remote village in Honduras is providing us with organic coffee, providing winter habitat for our song birds, stabilizing our global climate, preserving the forests that are the source of most of our medicines, creating oxygen to breathe and protecting the coral reefs from siltation as a result of deforestation.
So if a poor farmer in Honduras can do all this for us, what can we do for him?"
A farmer clears a few acres of rainforest and plants corn and beans, growing just enough to feed his family. Each year, yields are a little smaller, the soil a little more depleted. After a few years, the family moves on, leaving behind a moonscape of barren soil. On a new site, the process begins again, slashing and burning another piece of rainforest to create a new field.
"I saw the rainforest destruction—and the poverty—with my own eyes," says Florence Reed, who joined the Peace Corps as soon as she graduated from the University of New Hampshire. She was stationed in Central America, and it was there, where more than half the rainforest has been destroyed in the last 50 years, that Reed drew on her degree in environmental conservation, as well as on her own informal research, to facilitate reforestation efforts for villagers in Santa Rita, Panama. She was pleased with the results of the reforestation efforts. But she also realized that the forests would continue to be destroyed unless farmers were given significant technical assistance to learn sustainable farming practices that would allow them to grow on the same land every year instead of burning new swaths of forest. That realization sparked Reed's determination to devote her life to saving the rainforest.
So she launched Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) out of a bedroom office in her parents’ New Hampshire home in 1997, and it survived in the beginning on nothing more than that determination, a little start-up funding and her vision. Since then, SHI has reached more than 1800 families in 120 communities in Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Panama; and SHI farmers have helped to save thousands of acres of tropical forest, planted 2.5 million trees and raise their income as much as eight-fold.
"As far as I know, we are the only organization in the world providing long-term technical assistance to rural families in the tropics, offering them alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture," says Reed, who today shuttles back and forth between two very different worlds. In Central America, she makes her way by burro, by boat and by foot to villages deep in the rainforest. During rainy season, she has been stuck thigh-deep in mud. “This is when it dawns on me what it means to be the director of an international nonprofit,” she laughs. The other half of Reed’s time is spent in the United States visiting donors, reporting on SHI’s progress and hoping for more funding to carry on the work. As President of the organization, Reed spends her time guiding SHI forward with Central American farmers, Central American staff, Board members, US staff and supporters, bringing together a wide variety of individuals to create a better future. In recent years she has received an honorary doctorate for her work, along with many awards such as the Yves Rocher Women of the Earth award and Etown E-chievement award. And she was chosen to be a Delegate at the 2009 Opportunity Collaboration, a 4 day conference where some of the world’s major agents of change will explore ways to turn the tide of poverty.
“When people work together, things change for the better,” says Reed. “I know that together we can expand peoples’ realization that we can all have a role, big or small, in making the world a better place."
