Karimah Hudda - Bringing Grassroots Equity Into Global Corporations

[00:00:10] Christy: Welcome to Green Champions.

[00:00:11] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

[00:00:16] Christy: This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Christy.

[00:00:21] Dominique: And I'm Dominique.

[00:00:22] Christy: Today. We're getting to know Karimah Hudda. Karimah is the founder of Illumine 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, Karimah.

[00:00:38] Karimah: It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:40] Dominique: Karimah, we wanna start by hearing more about your journey, which we're gonna 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?

[00:00:52] Karimah: who we are is very much a factor of whose we are. So my grandmother was from a small village in the middle of India. And she was the wife of a wealthy landowner. She had seven children, and in her forties, decided she was gonna take those children and move to the city of Poona 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 if 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, helped 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 and flourishing for my brother and me.

And for me, it just meant that the world eventually became my world, and I began to live abroad, study abroad, work abroad, and travel 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 vein in who I am today, is this sense of our shared humanity. In a country and in a culture that was very class and caste driven, they believed that the pauper and the prince 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 housekeeper's 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 help's children to be nice to them. But to treat them exactly the same as you treat your daughters was very rare 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 active 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 the house, 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, that vein that informed and continues to inform everything that I do.

[00:03:35] Dominique: That is so interesting. And where did you move when you did come to the States?

[00:03:38] Karimah: Long Island, New York.

[00:03:40] Dominique: You also hinted at the fact that you've worked across 50 countries?

[00:03:44] Karimah: I've lived, traveled and work across 50 countries.

[00:03:46] Dominique: What are some of those roles that sent you to 50 countries? I know we have a lot of questions for you here today, but I wanna start getting a sense of what things you've been traveling around to do.

[00:03:54] Karimah: So the foundation of that was during Fairtrade, 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 ended up going all across Europe for that.

And of course I was living in Europe, so traveling personally as well. And then, for a short while I was the programs director for an NGO called Street Kids, which took me to a few countries in Africa, Sierra Leone, and then also during my time at Mondelēz, I traveled quite a lot to various countries.

[00:04:28] Dominique: That's awesome. I'm excited to get into all of that.

[00:04:30] Christy: Karimah, you talked about privilege a little bit in how you opened up and you also spoke about the three points you learned growing up. But one is if you could do anything, do good. And so I think that you've also been quoted as saying privilege is a product of chance in circumstance.

How has it informed your career choices?

[00:04:51] Karimah: I always knew that my life, my career was going to be about doing good, about 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 resettle, stabilize their children thought you can be anything as you want, as long as it's doctor or 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 gonna be a doctor, I knew that the end of that journey was going to be a career with an organization like Doctors Without 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 and research and 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 saying, "I don't wanna do this."

And they said, "It's fine, but we're not gonna let you finish your education without a graduate degree." And so it was very natural for me to look at the flip side of working without Doctors Without Borders, which was work 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, I didn't stay.

[00:06:18] Dominique: That's awesome. 

[00:06:19] Karimah: it sounds like such a big part of what you brought to like your studies and what you wanted to have an impact in was coming from your like multicultural experiences as a human being. And you saw the world like a little bit bigger, which I think is really cool.

[00:06:32] Dominique: What do you think was like the light bulb moment from migration and refugee conversations to sustainability?

[00:06:38] Karimah: 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 Master's, 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, on 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 Dharavi, 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 were already weaving bamboo baskets. And if they just worked a bit finer, they could get much higher prices for their baskets or for their other tchotchkes 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 chances, choices and circumstances, right? So along the way in Oxford, I'd met my husband, who also has the same master's degree as 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 Fairtrade 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 Fairtrade 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 Fairtrade 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 Fairtrade bubble because Fairtrade 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 livelihood, on financial literacy. But I kept getting pulled back to one of the elements that I was drawn to when I was at Fairtrade is this power of the big company to really do big quite fast.

When I was at Fairtrade, one of the projects that I worked on was helping the supermarket chain Marks & Spencer convert all of their teas and coffee to Fairtrade within six months. We'd never done a project at scale before, but it increased the sales of Fairtrade Tea tenfold. That means tenfold money went back to farmers and workers.

[00:09:59] Dominique: And just for a second, can you explain to our listeners, what the mission of Fairtrade is and like in contrast to a world without it?

[00:10:07] Karimah: So the mission of Fairtrade 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 cocoa 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 Fairtrade 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.

[00:10:52] Dominique: That and in an example like Marks and Spencer's, when you were kind of addressing items they already sell and trying to incorporate Fairtrade. 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 Fairtrade?

[00:11:10] Karimah: It was both. So what happens in commodity supply chains, cocoa and coffee are 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 move their supply chain into Fairtrade Certification."

Or we'd also then have already certified Fairtrade producers who we would propose that they take up as their producers, as their suppliers.

And fairtrade was a beautiful moment. We grew with the movement, we grew the revenue of Fairtrade 10x while I was there. It was about three to 4 billion euros in retail revenue by the time I left. Yeah, from just a little small movement that was employee number 13. 

[00:12:10] Dominique: I wanna note that is substantial in general. That immense sum 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 were creating access to transparency for shoppers who wanted to put their money in the right place.

[00:12:29] Karimah: Yeah. I still have a lot of friends from Fairtrade times. My husband and I went back to Bonn where we lived, where the Fairtrade Offices were headquarters, and where the Fairtrade Offices are still headquartered. And we met all of our old friends from those times.And 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. 

[00:13:07] Christy: Yeah, I love that. But you've also worked in large corporations like Nike and Mondelez. 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 Mondelez 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.

[00:13:31] Karimah: When I first started to approach large corporations, it was with the idea of helping them as a consultant, and it was just that moment when all these big food and ad companies and big consumer good companies were bringing in people like me who'd had field experience, but who'd also worked with large companies and who were very comfortable in multi-stakeholder complex environments. So as I was being recruited at Mondelez, my peers in other NGOs were being recruited with 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 a consultant." They'd all asked me to come in house and I thought, I never wanna work inside a corporation. And at that point I called my former CEO from Fairtrade, his name's Rob Cameron. And he ended up working for Nestle has just retired from there. And I said, "Rob, 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 of all the corporations that came to me, Mondelez resonated. So Mondelez is half of the former old company Kraft. Kraft in the 2010s has had 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 Mondelez'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 Kraft 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 job scope was sustainability for the Canada business. I was living in Toronto at the time and the stars just aligned. So I went in, fortunately 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, the right 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 Mondelez, first of all, within eight months, they changed my remit from Canada to North America. And then within those eight months, they also said, by the way, back then, Mondelez 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?" 

They flew me to Zurich every week while we landed the coffee sustainability strategy.

[00:16:22] Dominique: Every week?

[00:16:23] Karimah: Every week. The Air Canada people on that flight got 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, and then landing it.

And then they asked me to come and run it, but A, I didn't wanna go back to Europe at that moment, and B, this is how large corporations work, within three or four months it was announced that they were spinning off the coffee business. And so had I gone there, it would've been a completely different company that I was working for.

Instead, I stayed with Mondelez 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 worked in Mondelez, I graduated from Canada to North America to Global Procurement. And that's when a lot of the fun began because we had a Chief Procurement 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 punch tested 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 the industry and become an industry leader and work with all those other people that I mentioned that other companies were hiring from the outside in to move the industry to bring those solutions back to the company, to the enterprise to implement was the way I got things to work.

[00:17:58] Dominique: Karimah, 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 and planned.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?

[00:18:30] Karimah: I think that's a really good question 'cause that can be answered in so many ways, I think my early failures were, actually, every time I feel like I failed is when I've had to let a person go. And the minute I got into my producer support role at Fairtrade, I realized that all three of my field people had been mismanaged to the point that they, let's just say, weren't very above board and their dealings with producers and they had to be let go. And they were all middle-aged men and I was this 26-year-old woman and I'm South Asian and they were all South Asian. 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 said, "Get on with it, Karimah. You have all of our approvals." But yeah, so that was interesting. 

[00:19:12] Christy: Thanks for sharing that because I do think anytime you have to make those strong decisions, there's variables and lived experiences and culture that plays a part in that. I think personal failure, I don't, you didn't say that, but I have felt that in some ways how did I fail that person, my leadership.

I appreciate you sharing that and 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? 

[00:19:48] Karimah: 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, she said you have 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, "Okay mom". But I think I'm having a hard time talking to you about failure because it was such a par 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. And so it was just something where you had 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 men.

Also while I was at Mondelez, 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. And the way that happened is when I began looking at palm oil, I noticed that satellite technology was becoming a thing and that companies were starting to map and monitor their own supply chains, but that was creating overlaps and gaps. And I asked somebody how many palm oil mills there are in the world, and there were a finite number of palm oil mills. And I thought that should be easy to do.

And I ended up calling up peers in other companies, they said " no, we've sold this methodology, this monitoring of our own supply chains into our companies. We're not gonna 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 younger 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 at Walmart? Please do it, right? So I failed to get my peers to listen, but,

[00:21:48] Dominique: But some of that is knowing what levers to pull knowing what is gonna work. And I would argue you went to the right person and you found another solution.

[00:21:57] Karimah: Yeah, but also luck, right? We happen 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 at conferences. And one of the things that 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, lemme try again."

[00:22:23] Dominique: No I love that advice. And I love that you brought us home to advice 'cause I was about to ask you a similar question. And yeah, 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 gonna ask you, 'cause you mentioned at the beginning a bit about how you went from undergrad to graduate school and then into Fairtrade, and 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 Fairtrade 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 face in front of the right person? What do you think was critical for going from graduate of a program to that Fairtrade big role?

[00:23:21] Karimah: 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 he's a 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 gonna keep persisting.

The next piece was from grad school, applying to the CDE program and then getting in and again, applied to lots and lots of them. I was very excited about the possibility of going to one in Jamaica, ended up in Mumbai. And then afterwards we took the leap. 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 roles 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 my studies, but I think intuitively I knew I'm not a big UN culture person. And I was really interested in the concept of Fairtrade from having done the Handicraft Cooperative. 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, which is crazy.

But even doing those little things we always think, "oh, I've got a graduate degree. I must go start at a program officer level, or I must go start at that level." What I always tell 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 worked. And also ironically having worked in India and reconnected with my roots because there were so many South Asian producers. We connected at that level and we were able to move things rather than me just not knowing what to do.

[00:25:35] Dominique: That's awesome. And think you're such a great testament to confidence and persistence. And I truly appreciate you sharing the honesty in how it felt to go through your journeys. Thank you so much for sharing all that with us. I am very excited for our next conversation where we'll 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?

[00:25:59] Karimah: Yes, absolutely. My website is illumine.earth And I'm on LinkedIn. so follow me there as well.

[00:26:05] Dominique: Perfect. Thank you so much for chatting with us Karimah. I am very excited for next time.

[00:26:08] Christy: 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 connected with us on LinkedIn and Instagram @greenchampionspod. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll be back next time with another sustainability success story.