How a Family Foundation Is Accelerating its Funding to Fight Global Malnutrition

Will Moore is the first CEO of the Eleanor Crook Foundation, representing the third generation of the family foundation that his grandmother and grandfather co-founded back in 1997, driven by the idea that all mothers should have the means to nourish their children.

Since then, the foundation has granted more than $70 million to the global fight against malnutrition, and is gaining speed. At a 2017 summit, the foundation pledged $100 million to mitigate malnutrition over the following decade through research, advocacy and policy analysis.

Even before the pandemic exacerbated need, the foundation’s work was critical. Globally, malnutrition accounts for nearly half of all child deaths under the age of five—a full 3 million children every year, or one death every 10 seconds. Yet less than 1% of development dollars go to interventions.

Eleanor Crook Foundation stays true to its founding objectives while building on a legacy of family leadership. While some family foundations struggle to integrate the next generations, ECF has kept all parties engaged. Now 89, Eleanor Crook herself remains president, continuing decades of vision and experience. And since coming on board full-time in 2015, her grandson Will Moore has become a leading voice on the issue of global malnutrition, while mounting a fresh and ambitious response to eradicating the problem.

Now more than halfway to fulfilling its 2017 commitment, Moore offered us an inside look at the Eleanor Crook Foundation’s evolution, and its on-all-cylinders work on an issue the U.N. said may soon impact 811 million people worldwide.

Origin story

As much as anything, the foundation’s origin is a story about women, but it was also always about nutrition. Eleanor Crook’s grandmother, Florence Butt, opened and operated a small grocery out of her family home in Kerrville, Texas, back in 1905.

In the following century, that business boomed to become H-E-B, a grocery retailer that’s one of the largest private companies in Texas, with stores in more than 340 communities around the state and in Mexico. Still family-owned, the company donates 5% of its pre-tax profits to charities, separate from the family foundation.

Eleanor Crook and her husband, William Crook, traveled widely at a time when that was rare for most Americans. William Crook joined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty programs in the 1960s, and went on to lead AmeriCorps VISTA before entering the U.S. Foreign Service as ambassador to Australia. Their service allowed the couple to witness the hunger and poverty affecting millions worldwide, and gain first-hand knowledge of the circumstances on the ground.

That included the food famines in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s, a dire situation that spurred Eleanor’s advocacy work to raise public awareness and encourage American policymakers to act on the larger issues of global malnutrition.

Will Moore considers his grandmother “really a visionary,” a “global citizen” whose commitment traces back to directing Bread for the World in the 1960s, operating out of a church basement in D.C.

The couple created the foundation in 1997, and put their experience to work on a single issue: helping mothers around the globe feed their children.

Passing the torch

The only real evolution in ECF’s decades of work has been a “honing” from global hunger to severe malnutrition, said Moore, adding that all three generations of leaders have taken a “very modern approach.”

Eleanor Crook learned from watching her mother juggle competing priorities. Mary Elizabeth Butt was an early philanthropist in a way more in keeping with her times. She and her husband created the H.E. Butt Foundation, which “put Texas first” through a wide range of interests like TB diagnosis, public school programs and libraries.

“My grandmother, watching what worked and what didn’t, saw that focus was going to be key to making a difference in a single issue,” Moore explained, “something she called ‘just enough.’”

Unlike other next-gen leaders who grapple to find or fine-tune a strategic direction, Will Moore had a clear blueprint to follow. When his time came, he was ready to make a difference, in and outside the foundation.

After graduating from Columbia, he served as chief storyteller at the United Nations Millennium Campaign, a role that involved state-level goal-setting for meeting the SDGs. Later, he took on leadership roles at hunger organizations like Bread for the World and the Alliance to End Hunger.

Over the past six years, Moore has become a key convener, vocal advocate and thought leader in the global nutrition sector. Beyond grantmaking, he currently chairs the Coalition of Philanthropies for Nutrition and serves on the U.N. Foundation’s Global Leadership Council.

Three tactics

The ECF’s activities are aligned around three principal tactics: supporting research breakthroughs that can be brought to scale, conducting creative advocacy work to build awareness and catalyze the support of others, and pushing policy reform that breaks down the barriers to progress.

All avenues have chalked up measurable wins, including scaling WHO and U.N. Global Action Plan initiatives to treat child wasting, and boosting management of at-risk mothers and infants (MAMI) work in priority countries.

The foundation looks for bold, creative solutions to meet its objectives. A self-described “active” investor, it doesn’t shy away from taking risks or “rolling up its sleeves” to help boost big ideas.

Research breakthroughs

As an example of the kind of research breakthroughs ECF supports, Moore pointed to funding for an early phase concept that the International Rescue Committee (IRC) brought them in 2016, to test new tools for diagnosing and treating severe malnutrition and wasting.

“In essence, if you’re a mom in a developing country, and your child has any of the ‘big three’—pneumonia, diarrhea or malaria—a community health worker can treat you right there on the spot,” Moore said.

But battling the biggest killer, malnutrition, is another story, one that places the burden squarely on mothers. Treatment currently involves traveling to clinics that are often miles away, then returning once a week for two to four months. And that’s assuming that treatment is even available. Ready-to-use therapeutic food (RTUTF), typically a little foil package of peanut, dairy and vitamin paste, is “often hard to come by,” Moore said.

Then there’s the problem of administration, which presently requires high numeracy and literacy skills. The conceptual solution is developing a system that allows community health workers to bring malnutrition treatment home by replacing complicated math with a simple tool, a color-coded band/tape to determine the correct measurement of food for daily consumption.

While there are no accurate numbers yet, Moore sees such tools as a potential game-changer in the percentage of kids that can be reached in IRC consortium countries like South Sudan, Kenya and Malawi, then a broader base.

Moore also pointed to the foundation’s collaboration with Johns Hopkins as another example of research that can be scaled to save lives. The Power 4 analysis it helped fund identified the four most impactful interventions to reduce child mortality, including prenatal vitamins and breastfeeding support for new mothers, and vitamin A supplements and therapeutic food to treat wasting. The findings were supported by The Lancet and the World Bank, and are now used as the basis for funding strategies to save millions of lives, as illustrated by another grantee, 1000 Days.

Advocacy work

ECF’s advocacy work builds a case for prioritizing nutrition, and has catalyzed north of $500 million in additional philanthropic investments and private sector support to scale proven nutritional interventions. That includes work with Nourish the Future, a coalition-led initiative that aims to cut severe malnutrition in half across nine high-burden countries by breaking down silos between health and food systems.

More recently, ECF became a founding member of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, a new philanthropic collective that aims to spur new investments in improving nutrition outcomes around the world.

First introduced on the sidelines of the 2017 Global Nutrition Summit, the diverse coalition of philanthropic and corporate donors is now scaling up, with plans to invest in health and food systems on four continents. Besides ECF, founding members include Tata Trusts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and King Philanthropies, a new Silicon Valley-based foundation that committed $100 million to improve nutrition and food security outcomes. The coalition has already garnered $1 billion in commitments to advance the cause.

Generational knowledge

The advantages of ECF’s generational knowledge and continuity shows in two examples of the foundation’s work: one that demonstrates patience earned over time, and one that helps grow the community in an innovative way.

While some funders may have thought twice before making a five-year nutritional commitment in a geography that’s experiencing civil war, ECF recently took the long view, and joined two partners to establish a $30 million fund in Ethiopia.

Asked about funding during precarious times, Moore said the foundation has been challenged in all of its priority geographies during the 20-year time horizon of its work, and has built regime change and civil disruptions into its funding model by working through government systems and ministries of health. “Our view, to a certain degree, is to do what you can with folks who are willing to work with you,” he said.

The priority is hunger: “We’re trying to help the most vulnerable women and children,” said Moore, victims who “shouldn’t be punished” for circumstances well beyond their control.

The foundation also skates to the puck to get future audiences engaged in the war against malnutrition. In June, the foundation launched LifePack, a campaign to align the $200-billion-a-year global video game industry behind the issues of severe childhood malnutrition.

For every 25 cents raised via in-game purchases, LifePack will provide one ready-to-use therapeutic food pack to a starving child. A free game on the LifePack website allows gamers to unlock a day’s worth of packets every time they play. Today, 92,000 meals have been delivered to at-risk children in eastern Africa through LifePack’s first partner, Action Against Hunger. ECF hopes the campaign will help save 1 million malnourished children.

A sense of urgency

So what does someone so plugged into the fight to end malnutrition see as the field’s No. 1 priority at such a critical time?

“I’d say the philanthropic sector has arguably become a bit too focused on upstream things like systems change and capacity-building,” all things that are “certainly really important,” Moore said. “To a degree, we’ve lost focus on the fundamentals,” the service delivery philanthropy that focuses on “how our investments are scaling to make a difference in people’s lives.” For ECF, survival comes first.

Moore thinks the time for that is now, and that work should be taken up with the same urgency as getting vaccines in people’s arms. He also says funders shouldn’t lose sight of what’s right in front of them, and agrees with the wry sentiments of Bill Gates who, when asked about his fellow billionaires’ interest in space, said, “Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth.”

As hundreds of children are dying every day, Moore said, “It’s time to get mad.”

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