Brad Allen, vice president of marketing, product management and engineering at Genie Industries, is leaving the company for a new life helping poor farmers in Nicaragua. Allen is joining Pontis Nicaragua, a non-profit organization providing agricultural, business and life training to poor farmers in Nicaragua after a 17-year career with the aerial work platform manufacturer.
“Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and 60 percent of the rural population lives in extreme poverty, earning less than $2 per day,” Allen said. “Leveraging local expertise, Leck Heflin, executive director [of Pontis Nicaragua], has assembled a team in Nicaragua and developed a solid program to use a set of model farm training centers to bring higher yields, better prices at market, and more diverse crops on sustainable, less chemical-dependent farms. I have had a life target to serve the rural poor in some capacity in my early fifties and the time is right.”
Allen said team members and management at Genie and parent company Terex has been extremely supportive of his career change.
“Terex has a strong emphasis on community support, and views the corporate role as providing resources for individuals to serve and make the world a better place,” Allen said. “Being part of the Genie team has prepared me, both professionally and financially, to be able to do this.”
Allen has done volunteer work for more than 30 years and in 2008 was introduced to rural agricultural development through the organization Agros, working in the remote mountain community of Nueva Esperanza, near the city of Matagalpa, Nicaragua. Allen visited the community six times, learned Spanish, and developed close relationships with the 34 families who live there, working closely with Pontis Nicaragua’s chief agronomist Ernesto Martinez since 2009.
“I met Ernesto Martinez while volunteering with Agros,” Allen said. “I am consistently amazed at how Ernesto, while supposedly just teaching farming, is in fact addressing the full lives of families as they work their way out of poverty. In Nueva Esperanza there are now 280 people. Two of the families have paid off and own their land, and the entire community has houses, clean running water, latrines and operational farms. We continue to work with them, and are helping them form a regional farm cooperative, a truly sustainable business. This all started with long-time Genie team member Phil Harvey convincing 15 of us to support an Agros village.”
Allen said seeing a farm with four to five diverse crops neatly tended inspired him to try to grow that to 20 families, or 50, or 100 or even 1,000.
Allen will initially serve as director of engagement through 2017 and will be based at his home in the Seattle area.
“I shy away from using the term marketing,” Allen said. “I take a strong lesson from the Genie sales team that people want to engage with those who are honest, transparent, and develop a relationship with them. My role is simply to make our work in Nicaragua available so people can see if they can have a role in transforming lives.”
For more information on Pontis Nicaragua, visit www.pontisnicaragua.org.
