Karimah Hudda - Bringing Grassroots Equity Into Global Corporations

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to Green Champions. Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories. This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Kristi and I'm Dominique. Today we're getting to know Karima Huda. Karima is the founder of Aluminum Earth and has spent the past two decades working at the intersection of sustainability, leadership and systems change across nonprofits, global brands and community-based initiatives around the world. Thanks for joining us today Karima. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Karima, we want to start by hearing more about your journey, which we're going to get into today. But are there any early experiences maybe in your childhood that shaped your sense of purpose and responsibility towards community and equity? Who we are is very much a texture of who's we are. So my grandmother was from a small village in the middle of India and she was the wife of a coffee-land owner. She had seven children and in her 40s decided she was going to take those children and move to the city of Kuna in India for one reason so that her children could grow and flourish where there was better education and better opportunity. She had no need to do so. There was plenty of money, but she knew that they wouldn't actually be part of the modern world that they didn't speak English. This investment and this courage of my grandmother to move from the village to the city and give up a lifestyle and a status to be part of a bigger community helps my mother and her siblings and their children truly grow and flourish. My mother took it a step further. When I was a child, she moved us to America and that unlocked the next level of growth of flourishing for my brother and me. And for me, it just meant that the world eventually became my world and I began to live a broad study, a broad work abroad and traveled to nearly 50 countries. Now, when I think about these two women and what I really learned from them, I learned three major things. One is that you can do anything you set your mind to so dream big. The second part was care and compassion for them because they grew up around poverty and they lived amongst really poor people and were privileged. There was this deep sense of doing anything they could to alleviate poverty and really bring people out of poverty. And the third piece which is such a strong thing in who I am today is the sense of our shared humanity. In a country and in a culture that was very class and cast driven, they believed that the popper and the prints were equal. And so everybody was treated exactly the same way everybody was cared for exactly the same way. So with my grandmother, I actually thought for the longest time my mother had two extra sisters. My grandmother had informally adopted her housekeepers' daughters and raised them alongside her own daughters. And there was no difference. It was very common and it's still very common to educate your house, helps children to be nice to them but to treat them exactly the same as you treat your daughters was very aware and it still is. And then even in childhood when I saw my mother, she raised us, she ran her own business. She did community service in the back of the beyond because we were living in small town, India. And there was all these people in rural areas who had nothing. She was acted in politics and she partied a lot. I don't know how she did all that because we didn't have that much help in health. But she did it but just this idea that you can do anything and when you can do anything, do good and contribute to betterment of humanity was really that vein that informed and continues to inform everything that I do. That is so interesting. And where did you move when you did come to the States? Long Island, New York. You also hinted at the fact that you've worked across 50 countries. I've lived, traveled, and worked across 50 countries. What are some of those roles that sent you to 50 countries? I know you've got a lot of questions for you here today, but I want us to be getting a sense of what things you've been traveling around to do. So the foundation of that was during Fair Trade. I was responsible for supporting 280,000 farmers and farm workers across Asia and was responsible for 13 countries across Asia. And then we were also growing the movement and working with companies across Europe and North America. So I ended up going all across Europe for that. And of course, there was living in Europe so traveling personally as well. And then for a short while, it was the program director for an enducle street kids who checked me to a few countries in Africa, Sierra Leone. And then also during my time at Mondaleese, I traveled quite a lot to various countries. That's awesome. I'm excited to get into all of that. Karima, you talk about privilege a little bit in how you opened up and you also spoke about the three points you learned growing up. And one is if you can do anything, do good. And so I think that you've also been quoted as a privilege is a product of chance in circumstance. How has it informed your career choices? I always knew that my life, my career was going to be about doing good, but having an impact. And I was told as a child that I was supposed to be a doctor because my parents, with their perspective of what progression looks like and very clearly being Indian immigrants who are trying to reset as data-izer children, thought you can be anything as you want as long as it's doctor, a lawyer, engineer, and later on investment banker, although that was a very incongruous choice for who my parents are. And so I thought I was going to be a doctor, but even when I thought I was going to be a doctor, I knew that the end of that journey was going to be a career with an organization like doctors or that borders. And I went to undergrad at the University of Washington, which is an excellent school. I studied microbiology. I did a lot of volunteer work in research in medicine and I just didn't like it. And so I then said I need to figure out what to do. I don't want to spend my parents' money or my time in going to medical school when I don't like it. And so I ended up going to my parents and say I don't want to do this. And they said it's fine, but we're not going to let youth and a child education without a graduate degree. And so it was very natural for me to look at the flip side is working without doctors, without borders, which is working in international development, learn about international development, and I ended up applying to and going to Oxford to study refugee studies because that was the closest to the kind of work that MSF does. And that's how I ended up in the refugee studies development field as an education, although it didn't stay. - That's awesome. It sounds like such a big part of what you brought to your studies and what you want to have an impact in was coming from your multicultural experiences as a human being. And you saw the world a little bit bigger, which I think is really cool. What do you think was the light bulb moment from migration and refugee conversations to sustainability? - When I was in the refugee studies masters, I realized that it was really important that people were in refugee camps and helping or they were working on policy, but I was being called to work on prevention. I've always not been able to accept why things are the way they are if they're not good. Why are refugees the way they are? Why do we have refugees? Why do we have economic refugees? And I come from a long line of business people. And so when I finished my masters, I ended up applying to and getting into a program that the Canadian International Development Agency, which is now called Global Affairs Canada had, for young people to go abroad, to work with local partners of Canadian NGOs on projects and programs. And I applied all over the world and ended up going to Bombay, to Mumbai, about two hours from where I'm from and working in Tharavi, which is Asia's largest slum and built a handicraft cooperative. And just this process of realizing that when you do something very small, when you bring artisans, these were people who already weaving bamboo baskets, and they'd be just warped a big finer. They could get much higher prices for their baskets or for their other attach keys that they could make. And when they came together and they are organized and were able to actually negotiate and sell on better terms, that their livelihoods would shoot up and their future and the future of their children could become better, was this big light bulb moment. And so it was just also this chance of choices and circumstances, right? So along the way in Oxford, I'd met my husband, who also has the same masters, to breathe me, he was my classmate. And he came to India with me. And then after that, we decided that we would go to Germany because he had his opportunity to do a PhD. And when I was in Germany, I discovered that the headquarters of the fair trade movement was in Bonn, which was an hour and a half away from where we were living. And so I just applied to any job that would take me. I started at the bottom doing trade auditing, making sure that the companies were paying fair prices for fair trade goods and that they were following the terms and then worked myself up to becoming the head of producer support in Asia and also then working with very large companies, building coalitions, working with the UN and building partnerships and whatnot. That was a moment where you could see almost the immediate impact of business on the lives of people. You could see that when farmers were empowered, where they could come together and negotiate with their exporters differently, that step change could happen. And then, so I was in fair trade from 2003 to 2010 and we moved to Canada because we wanted to change countries. And I also wanted to change and grow out of the fair trade bubble because fair trade was beautiful. And so for a while in Canada, I was in the international development sector in street kids, working with street kids and again on library hood, on financial literacy. But I kept getting cold back to one of the elements that I was drawn to and I was at fair trade as power of the big company to really do big good fast. When I was at fair trade, one of the projects that I worked on was helping the supermarket chain, Marks and Spencer convert all of their teas and coffee to fair trade within six months. We'd never done a project that's gal before, but it increased the sales of fair trade T10 fold. That means tenfold money went back to farmers and workers. And Just for a second, can you explain to our listeners what the mission of fair trade is and like in contrast to a world without it? So the mission of fair trade is essentially, you think about at a very human level, the most basic things you like to consume in life, bananas, chocolate, coffee. These cannot exist without the farmer or the worker growing the cacao or the coffee or the bananas, right? But most often it's the workers and the farmers that grow your food that gets the least amount of the value of that banana or the bar of chocolate or the bag of coffee. And so the entire concept of fair trade was to make the share of that value of the banana or cocoa or chocolate more fair, more equitable for the farmer or the worker. And so the concept was make sure that farmers get a fair price. And then on top of that, they get an extra premium so that they can reinvest in their business and grow their business. That in an example like Marxist-Fencers, when you're kind of addressing items, they already sell and trying to incorporate fair trade. Are you working with each individual product and trying to improve their supply chain and their processes? Or are you looking for alternatives that are willing to do fair trade? It was both. So what happens in commodity supply chains? Coco and coffee or commodity supply chains is you generally either have a supply chain that's set up and it's got farmers at the beginning of it. And you are at the end of it or you don't know where your cocoa or coffee comes from. So either you go to your suppliers and you say, let's make sure that these farmers get trained and they get certified so that they can actually handle the extra money properly and they can grow their business. They can become more resilient. Or you say, I'm buying on the open market. I don't know. And then we would help them map it back and booth their supply chain into fair trade certification. Or we'd also then have already certified fair trade producers who you would propose that they take up as their producers as their suppliers. Fair trade was a beautiful moment. We grew with the movement. We grew the revenue of Fair Trade 10X while I was there. It was about three to four billion euros in retail revenue by the time I last. Yeah, from just a little small movement that was employee number 13. I don't want to know that is substantial in general. That is an then some impressive for an organization creating so much good and providing a value across the board from like the farmer point of view and for the consumer. You are creating access to transparency for shoppers who wanted to put their money in the replace. Yeah, I still have a lot of friends from fair trade times. As when I went back to bond where we lived where the fair trade offices were headquarters and where the fair trade offices are still had quartered and we met all of our old friends from those times. There's a bond that we all have that's from those times because we were in a moment together where we were able to move big good fast and we can't believe that we could almost because we were so young and we're making mistakes and falling over ourselves but just making sure we continue to plow ahead. Sometimes moving forward in a messy way and just making sure that you stay focused on the big picture and moving the big picture is also equally important. Yeah, I love that. But you've also worked in large corporations like Nike and Mondalee's and I'd like to hear a little bit about what was your experience transitioning to those organizations that are larger. Maybe tell us a little bit about Mondalee's and your role there as well as Nike but then help us understand a little bit about that transition into your sustainability roles into those large corporates when I first started to approach large corporations that was with the idea of hopping them as a consultant and it was just that moment when all these big food and at companies and big consumer good companies were bringing people like me who had failed experience but who'd also work with large companies and who were very comfortable and multi-stakeholder. They're complex environments so as I was being recruited at Mondalee's my peers in other NGOs were being recruited by other food companies as well which was actually very important for part of the story later on. So when I actually went to all these companies and I said I'd like to be your consultant they all asked me to come in half and I never want to work inside a corporation. And at that point I called my former CEO from Fair Trade and they've brought camera and he ended up working for Nestle and is just retired from there and I said, "What should I do? They want me to come in house every time I ask." And he said, "Go inside, see how it is. If you don't like it, you can always leave." And so I did. I had a lot of support but it was still a very different culture. Corporations have very large cultures and hierarchies that you have to learn and understand and integrate into if you're really going to make a difference. And so all the corporations that came to me, Mondalee's resonated. So Mondalee's is half of the former old company craft craft in the 2010s has gotten into an acquisition spree with Cadbury and Toblerone and Milka and then gotten so big that they had to split the company into half. So the snacking part became not Mondalee's Oreos, Ritz, Cadbury's largest snacking company in the world. And because it was at the end of 2012 that I started to work with them or to talk to them about moving inside the company, they said, "We're new." There's still a lot of old craft culture but the idea is to change it and to evolve into something new. So even though we've got a sustainability strategy set up, things could change. And so I thought this looks nice and it just happened to be that the drab's scope was sustainability for the Canada business. I was living in Toronto at the time and the star is just aligned. So I went in, fortunately, it had a lot of allies and a lot of people in my corner who knew that even though I'd been in a complex organization that this was a cultural change and a lot of people who just took me under their wings and made sure that I had the right exposure or the light guidance and the right opportunity. It was still a big culture shock but what also happened within the first two years that I was at Mondalee's first of all, within eight months, they changed my remits from Canada to North America. And then within those eight months, they also said, "By the way, back then, Mondalee's also used to be the second largest coffee company in the world." And they said, "By the way, we need somebody to help us land our coffee sustainability strategy." So could you just come to Zurich every week and help us do that? If we meet a Zurich every week while we landed the coffee sustainability strategy every week, every week. They are a kind of people on that flight, God to know me so well. But it was a very fulfilling time because it was an opportunity to work with a team that had already built the building blocks and they were trying to make sure that it wasn't about disrupting them, but it was about bringing it all together, validating it, making sure that it fit best practices for my expertise in landing it. And then they asked me to come and run it, but I didn't want to go back to Europe at that moment and be. This is how large corporations work within three or four months. It was announced that they were spending off the coffee business. And so had I gone there, it would have been a completely different company that I was working for. Instead, I stayed with Mondalees in North America and they kept me parked in Toronto, which was great and ended up asking me to do bigger and bigger things. And so after a couple of years of working Mondalees, I graduated from Canada to North America to global procurement. And that's when a lot of the sun began because we had a chief for careman officer at the moment who was very supportive. His leadership team was very supportive and every time I proposed something big, they said, yes, how can we make this happen? They punched us at it. They made sure that it was sound that it made sound business sense. They taught me a lot about the mindset of procurement so that I could adjust my language. They gave me free reign to go learn about the other parts of the business, this ability to integrate and understand the enterprise and become an enterprise leader, along with continuing to engage to the industry and become an industry leader and work with all those other people that I mentioned, and that other companies were hiring from the outside in to move the industry to bring the solutions back to the company, to the enterprise to implement was the way I got things to work. Karima, you've talked a lot about this progression. You mentioned in some ways you're like, I just applied to a million jobs, but it seems actually so thought out in the end for building blocks of a career. So that is just I think something interesting for our listeners to think about things might look smooth and go this certain way, but they don't always do this. Can you share an idea whether it was a failure or just a turning point that happened that really forced you to rethink how you approach leadership? I think that's a really good question because I can be answered in so many ways. I think my early failures were every time I feel like I failed is when I had to let a person go and the minute I got into my producer support role at Fair Trade, I realized that all three of my field people had been mismanished at a point that they let's just say weren't very about board and their dealings with producers and I had to be like, go and they were all middle aged men and I was just 26 or woman and I'm South Asian and they were all South Asian. And I think I just took too long coordinated with too many people to the point that one of our leaders, one of our board members like get on with that. You have all of our approvals, but yeah, so that was interesting. Thanks for sharing that because I do think anytime you have to make those strong decisions or cerebells and lived experiences and culture that plays a part in that. I think personal failure. I don't need to say that, but I have felt that in some ways. How did I fail that person? Yeah, my leadership. I appreciate you sharing that and I think an important part and I believe you would agree, but every time that there's this thing, we call a failure. If we didn't have that, we wouldn't learn something and be able to move forward better or bigger or different. Would you agree with that? What are your thoughts on failure and the importance of failure? I feel like that goes back to that story of my mother and grandmother teaching me to grow and flourish and my mom always say every time I change something to try it. And it's very interesting because we come from a business. family when somebody comes to her and says, "I don't have enough money. She'll say, "Go make it. Go make more." I think I think I came on. I think I'm hiding a hard time talking to you about failure because it was such a part for the course, right? It's not like when I was building this coalition of 280,000 farmers and farm workers that everybody was on side and then every meeting went well and people didn't get ticked off. You just brush yourself off and get up another day and do it because if you don't, then you give up. It was just something where you have difficult people or you had a fight amongst the people who were building the coalition and you had to take a pause and you had to take a break, have dinner, and then come back the next day as a youngest person and a woman putting this coalition together with a lot of us. Also, while I was at Mondaleys, one of the things that I'm most proud of is that I catalyze the movement to put the entire supply of palm oil onto one map that could be monitored via satellite and that everybody could watch together in the industry. The way that happened is when I began looking at palm oil, I noticed that satellite technology was the coming thing and that companies were starting to map and monitor their own supply chains, but that was creating overlaps and gaps. I asked somebody how many palm oil mills there are in the world and there were a finite number of palm oil mills. I thought that should be easy to do and I ended up calling out peers and other companies. They said, "No, we've sold this methodology, this monitoring of our own supply chains into our companies. We're not going to change now." And it just so happens that a few months later, I was in a meeting with a woman who's no longer at Walmart, but it was then at Walmart, much of her than I am. And I said to her, "I'm really frustrated. I think we need to do this." And she said, "Do you want me to call the meeting on Walmart?" "Please do it." Right? So I failed to get my peers to listen, but. But some of that is knowing what levers to pull, knowing what is going to work. And I would argue, you went to the right person and you found our solution. Yeah. We're also lucky, right? We happened to be at the same conference. She could have not been there. I could have not been there. Calling somebody is not the same as being in the hallways that a conference is. And one of the things I also, again, those tidbits that I give is go to conferences. Don't go to everyone. Don't go to none. Go to those conferences and engage people and get to know each other because so many deals and so many ideas and so many solutions happen in these side conversations where you meet the person you think, "Oh, wait. Let me try it down." No, I love that advice. And I love that you brought us home to advice because I was about to ask you a similar question. And I think that's a great point. And also a nice reminder, I think for young people navigating their career in a very digital world, I think that advice isn't said that often. And it's a nice reminder that those spaces are still very productive. And that's where a lot of decisions do happen. And so the more that you're able to be there, the more access you have, I was going to ask you because you mentioned at the beginning a bit about how you went from undergrad to graduate school and then into fair trade. And I think you have a dream career for some young people. And I'm curious to understand what was so critical from your point of view to make that jump into the role with fair trade. And what advice that would offer anybody listening in terms of, was there anything in particular that you got involved in? Or was there a way that you got your base in front of the right person? What do you think was critical for going from graduate of a program to that fair trade big role? So first of all, it's not that easy. And we know this, right? We all had our starter jobs. And I had a bit of not very straightforward path, right? So after graduate school, I ended up not knowing what else to do because I thought, oh, let me apply to NGOs, but also let me apply to graduate school again. Let me get a PhD. And I didn't get into any PhD program. And I'm really glad that I didn't because my husband did his PhD very soon after we got married. And that experience showed me his great researcher. I am not so I'm glad I didn't get in. So sometimes when things don't work out, it's because they're not for you. And if they're for you, you're going to keep persisting. The next piece was from grad school applying to the CEDA program and then getting in and again, apply to lots and lots of them. I was very excited about the possibility of going to win a Jamaica and it happened Mumbai. And then afterwards we took the lead. My priority at that moment was my husband and I were young and in love and we wanted to be together. And I just moved to Germany with him and we lived on very little money and I applied to Rose all over. And I applied to a few other roles at Fairtrade that didn't pan out. This one did at the same time as the one at the International Organization for Migration in Geneva. International Organization for Migration was very much aligned with my studies, but I think into it every I knew I'm not a big UN culture person. And I was really interested in the concept of Fairtrade from having done the Heidekraft property. So I stayed there. Also decided to stay close to my partner and then didn't worry too much looking at spreadsheets. And those days we used to get reports mailed in and I transitioned people to actually being able to report via email on Excel. Just crazy. But even doing those little things, we always think oh, I got a graduate degree. I must go start at a program officer level or must go start at that level. What I always saw people start doing this. Just keep persisting going to the places that you need to do the internship, ask and then just I kept asking until they said fine, we'll let you try out for the producer support role. We think you're a bit young, but okay. So ended up being the youngest one doing that and that work. And also ironically having worked in India and reconnected with my roots because there were so many South Asian producers, we connected that that level and we were able to move things rather than me just not knowing what to do. That's awesome. I think you're such a great testament to confidence and persistence and I actually appreciate you sharing the honesty and how it felt to go through your journey. So thank you so much for sharing all that with us. I am very excited for our next conversation where we get to dive into your champion story and more of how you've created impact in these roles. Is there any way for listeners to keep up with you or support the work that you're doing? Yes, absolutely. My website is elimin.earth. Then I'm on LinkedIn, though follow me there as well. Perfect. Thank you so much for chatting with us, Kareemah. I am very excited for next time. You can find all of our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Stay compacted with us on LinkedIn and Instagram at GreenChampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dwake. Thanks for listening to GreenChampions. We'll be back next time with another sustainability success story.