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Congratulations to Heifer International, which has been named LINGOs’ 2015 Member of the Year! The annual award honors a LINGOs member organization that has demonstrated commitment to LINGOs’ mission: providing affordable, high-quality learning solutions to those working to improve lives in developing and vulnerable communities. Chris Proulx, LINGOs’ CEO, presented the award to Hilary Haddigan, Holly Dunning and Tamidra Marable of Heifer International in a ceremony Wednesday night at the Global Learning Forum.
In a statement before the ceremony, Hilary Haddigan, Chief of Mission Effectiveness at Heifer, thanked LINGOs for the “recognition of the journey Heifer is on,” noting that it was an honor for Heifer to be in service to the communities where it works.
Heifer International, a longtime LINGOs member organization, is dedicated to ending hunger and poverty, and to caring for the Earth. In support of this mission, Heifer has worked closely with the LINGOs community to develop and share best practices for organizational learning and capacity building.
When a new Learning Management System was rolled out to the LINGOs community this year, Heifer consistently provided the community with its findings and solutions to shared challenges.
“The idea was to go through [the LMS rollout] together,” says Holly Dunning, Talent Development Manager at Heifer. “We were creating a lot of materials that we were sharing with the rest of the [LINGOs community]. We didn’t want to miss a second of it.”
In its push to build capacity across the organization, Heifer has also been a leading champion and adopter of PMD Pro, a training and professional certification designed for project managers in the development sector. Tamidra Marable, Talent Development Manager at Heifer, says that PMD Pro is “a central tool” in Heifer’s goal to help 4 million families achieve a living income by 2020, adding that as staff and partners are trained in the approach, everyone “gains a common taxonomy and understanding of our way of working.”
In short, it’s about collaboration – and strategy. Proulx calls Heifer International “a model organization in terms of linking business strategy to learning and performance improvement.”
For NGOs that are developing learning plans of their own, Proulx says that “the takeaway from Heifer is to align the learning activities that you’re doing with your organization’s specific business challenges or objectives. [Learning success] is about focus, more than it is about breadth and depth of resources.”
About the Global Learning Awards
Presented annually at LINGOs’ Global Learning Forum, the Global Learning Awards celebrate individuals and organizations that have significantly supported LINGOs’ mission: ensuring that its members and the NGO community at large have access to affordable, appropriate learning wherever they work.
