AbelsonTaylor’s 20th Anniversary with Heifer International

Anyone who knows our agency’s founder, Dale Taylor, knows that he has the heart and generosity of a true philanthropist. Both privately and corporately, he and AbelsonTaylor have a decades-long history of supporting organizations dedicated to improving people’s health and social wellbeing.

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of AbelsonTaylor’s special relationship with Heifer International, the global organization that provides livestock, tools and training to help people in some of the poorest places in the world gain greater self-sufficiency and sustainable food security. The relationship began in December 2002, when Dale and AbelsonTaylor’s senior leadership team decided to dispense with typical holiday client gifts and instead donate in each client’s name to Heifer, providing cows, goats, ducks and other livestock to farmers who desperately needed them.

Taking a Deeper Dive

Flash forward 20 years, and AbelsonTaylor is still making an annual donation to Heifer in our clients’ names – in fact, we’re one of the organization’s largest and oldest continuous donors. But our contributions are now earmarked for specific multi-year initiatives, which we’ve supported not only through financial contributions, but also with our time and skills.

One such initiative is the East Africa Dairy Development project (EADD), which has helped more than 230,000 dairy farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda improve the quality and yield of their milk production. We supported the project from 2016-2020, supplementing our financial sponsorship with AbelsonTaylor’s creative talents and the services of dose, the agency’s top-of-the-line studio for high-tech animation, online video and film/video production.

A group of staff traveled to Kenya to interview dairy farmers and create donor and recruitment videos for Heifer to use in promoting EADD. We also produced a documentary and developed a communications strategy supporting a Heifer campaign to increase milk consumption in Tanzania.

Our Current Mission

For the six-year period of 2020 through 2025, AbelsonTaylor is sponsoring Heifer’s Future of Food project in Ecuador, whose goal is to teach 18,000 small-scale farming families how to increase the size of their crops and create new markets as a means of raising the average farm’s income from a subsistence level of $567 per month to a living income of $706 per month.

Now at the midway mark, the Future of Food project is making great strides forward. Because the launch coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heifer focused initially on improving market access conditions and seeking new distribution chains for the farmers. This resulted in initiatives like a program that delivered fresh produce directly to customers’ homes during the pandemic and creation of an online store promoting the agricultural products of five participating groups.

In other achievements, the Future of Food project has improved the infrastructure and operation of multiple food collection centers, helped families start new businesses, and established schools for teaching farmers the health and economic advantages of improving soil and managing pests and diseases using chemical-free methods.

As the Future of Food moves forward, Heifer will enroll more farmers in the project, expand training, and continue developing partnerships with various stakeholders to help advance the project’s goals. AbelsonTaylor will be proudly by their side.