Sara Menker and Gro Intelligence Are Tackling Global Hunger
These two women have been working with hungry people in the world for more than a decade. But that long history doesn’t just provide a history of the way they’ve built on the work of other nonprofit organization, it also speaks to their own individual journey.
These two women have been working with hungry people in the world for more than a decade. But that long history doesn’t just provide a history of the way they’ve built on the work of other nonprofit organization, it also speaks to their own individual journey.
While Sara Menker’s role as the former CEO of One Drop International was about scaling a global enterprise, the work she has carried with Gro Intelligence is about a different kind of scaling. She’s tackling global hunger from the inside, with the help of other like-minded women, and she’s doing it while maintaining a strong sense of purpose and ownership.
“I never want to be just a small player. I want to be the one who leads the charge,” she confesses. “I think for me, I was put here for a reason, and if I don’t do anything different, I don’t think I’m going to know why. So I want to be a leader in this world.”
And being a leader requires a different kind of leadership skill set than simply running your organization’s day-to-day operations. Menker and Gro Intelligence recognized that while their leaders have been able to move through a lot of information and have a pretty good understanding of how they work, they don’t always have the necessary skills to carry them through the challenges faced by their organizations.
Menker has also spent the last 20 years in the food industry, which has afforded her insight into the ways that food production is not just about growing and selling food, but also about growing the supply of food in the world.
So how did she come to Gro Intelligence? Well, in 2011 Sara Menker came to Gro Intelligence, Inc., as the CEO. After working with the organization for about a year as that role, she was approached by the Board of Directors to come back with a plan to transform Gro Intelligence into a nonprofit organization that could be sustained in the future, and that could also do good in the world. When
