Karimah Hudda - What if Trade was Actually Fair?

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

[00:00:12] Christy: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

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

[00:00:23] Christy: And I am Christy.

[00:00:23] Dominique: Today we are very excited to be back with Karimah Hudda and her champion story. We're gonna better understand the impact she's had on the world. We got to hear last time a little bit about her background.

She shared about her passion looking around prevention, especially when working with refugees and migration that led her to sustainability. We learned a bit about the influence that her own family has had, her upbringing in India and her mother, her grandmother. And then also finding creative ways to move from outside impact with Fairtrade for an example, to inside large organizations.

Great episode. I really recommend giving it a listen. Karimah is also the founder of Illumine Earth and has spent the last two decades working at the intersection of sustainability, leadership, and systems change. Working across nonprofits, global brands, and community-based initiatives around the world, literally around the world.

We talked about how she's worked across 50 countries in our last episode. So, Karimah, thanks for coming back.

[00:01:16] Karimah: Happy to be here.

Awesome. Well, Karimah, let's kick it off by talking about Fairtrade. So also one of the things that I want to let people know is that I stopped working for Fairtrade in 2010, so my knowledge of the movement is a little outdated, but the concept of Fairtrade really is about making trade fair for the people who grow our food and our commodities with which we make our clothes.

So cotton, cocoa, coffee, bananas, spices, tea, 'cause often we consume these things very happily. We pay a certain amount for them. But what often we don't realize is that the people who grow our food, who grow our cotton, get the least amount of what we've paid for those things. But if they stop growing those things, then we won't have food to eat.

And so Fairtrade really is about rebalancing the terms of trade, making sure that farmers and workers get more, get a fair share of the value of what we purchase, and that they also have a little extra called a premium that they can reinvest to make their communities, their businesses more resilient.

[00:02:20] Dominique: When you think back to first taking that role with Fairtrade and like where the movement was when you started, what was the situation like on the ground for farmers and workers? And maybe like that power dynamic in particular?

[00:02:32] Karimah: So I think this has been going on for time immemorial.

I don't think this is a new thing, right? So, people who've traded, people who've consumed, people who've converted commodities like cocoa, coffee, tea into the goods that we consume have always kept more of the value than the farmer. And I think I'd have to struggle to get the timelines right, but about 50 years ago, there were a couple of Dutch priests who decided that they were working, they were on mission in South and Central America. And they noticed the plight of these coffee farmers in Central America and they decided that they wanted to do things differently and they started to actually bring bags of coffee back with them when they were home and sabbatical.

And that started this movement around, well, let's just circumvent the middle of the supply chain that keeps all of that value and let's trade more directly. And that actually led to an evolution where if they wanted to do that on scale, they needed to have the right standards and the systems in place.

So organizations like Fairtrade International were created to make sure that it wasn't just those few farmers that were working with a priest that were coming back to Europe, but truly all the small holder farmers, all the workers that needed the support to get more value for the produce they were growing could actually enter the Fairtrade system.

[00:03:47] Christy: Thinking through one of the things that you said is that what it looks like for farmers is that they're not getting as much of the portion of the sales of the product that they're actually creating, it's caught in the supply chain. So that sounds like one of the things that you're trying to address.

[00:04:05] Karimah: So, with those concepts in your mind, what does success look like when you're building a system where these producers share that power or that the value of that money and being able to even set the terms? So both in the Fairtrade movement and in corporate sustainability have been really fortunate to come in almost at an inflection point. And when I came into Fairtrade, when Fairtrade International was really deciding to accelerate standardization of, you know, what it meant to be a Fairtrade farmer, to certify farmers more formally rather than just having somebody go as on the basis of a relationship and check.

And that created the ability to scale and corporate sustainability was moving from the CSR realm to truly becoming embedded in the business and becoming a business endeavor. And so in that moment, my role within Fairtrade was to make sure that farmers and workers could get the right support and capacity building to use the money that they were getting from Fairtrade and also where they had governance gaps, equity gaps. Right? You're talking about farmers where women don't have equal say, or you're talking about places where there hasn't been a board, where there hasn't been a cooperative setup. So it had a bunch of field people called liaison officers who were in the countries where the farmer organizations and the workers were located. And they went to the farmers and the worker organizations to do the training to help them set up the board so that they could govern themselves.

They did the training on decision making so that the decisions could be made with the money so that they could be more equity in how the decisions were made. And they also did a lot of grassroots coalition building. So one example is I had a person in Indonesia who we couldn't actually do work on the ground in Indonesia until the Indian Ocean tsunami happened. So what happened is most of the Fairtrade producers in Indonesia were in the province of Aceh and the province right south of that, Sumatra. For the longest time, that region was embroiled in Civil war. The Indian Ocean tsunami actually put an end to that civil war and there was enough stability that we could have field people there. But the people that were growing the coffee and the cocoa in that region, who were Fairtrade farmers, they were also guerilla warriors. And they lived and done trade and produced coffee in the most difficult circumstances. And so when we got there, one of the things that my field person realized is that not only did they need the training and capacity building that, but that she should also bring them together.

So within two years of having gone to Aceh for the first time to do my recon, my wonderful colleague on the ground had called together a meeting of a hundred representatives of farmer organizations who sometimes drove overnight into the mountains of Aceh and Takengon, the main city and the mountains. And they sat around and did the strategic planning for how they were going to come together, how they were gonna negotiate differently.

The funny thing is that they actually also invited their exporters and they negotiated the exporters in front of us and the dynamic was completely different. And so this idea of not that people don't have the potential, not that people don't have the capability, they sometimes have never had that catalyst or their spark or somebody to come in and give them the tools and the frameworks to unleash that potential.

Those farmers had protected their land and they had fought for their land for 30 years. They were not weak, but just this idea of somebody coming together with start planning process, just spark them to be the ones that were going to be negotiating for their future and standing up for their rights and their value.

[00:07:39] Dominique: That example is so like easy to visualize and see how that could have a big impact, but it also feels true for organizations across the board. And I like that you mentioned like they were struggling with support, they needed capacity building, they were lacking in equity and having a board and the cooperative to support them.

Even like lacking community collaboration, which obviously unlocking that allowed them to have more leverage and conversations that were really important. And you do talk a lot about strategy and like strategic thinking for us to get out of these really complex problems, which this problem is a problem for a reason.

There's a lot of complexity going on. Can you unpack that a little bit more 'cause you talked about they were able to engage in strategic planning to kind of unlock maybe new ways of thinking and collaborating to have these conversations. Is there like a secret sauce in there? Like what do you think was so powerful?

Were there any key questions they were allowed to like say out loud? Like, what was the magic?

[00:08:34] Karimah: So the roots of doing that work are in international development and a participatory development approaches. So there are a lot of tools you can use to brainstorm to help order thoughts into streams of action. But I think the two most important things to think about, whether you're doing it in international development or sustainability or coalition building is number one, don't overcomplicate. We often think systems change or big change has to be complicated and slow, and if we're overcomplicating it, take a step back and bring it back to the simplest action, the simplest lever we can pull in that moment that everybody is aligned to pulling. Often it's a big problem to solve it's an urgent problem where people are happy to stay messy and not be perfect. The other piece is believe in people. Really, these were not people who had a lot of formal education. When I did the bigger coalition building across the producers in Asia, the 280,000 farmers and farm workers, if I'd been perfect and said, no, we need a farmer and a worker at the table every time instead of the plantation owner or the exporter or the NGOs that were supporting them, we wouldn't have gotten far.

But the process of getting a few willing people who were truly visionary and deciding that the power paradigms needed to shift, actually unlocked more possibilities because at some point, the plantation owners themselves and the NGOs and the exporters themselves said, Hey wait, we can't be hypocritical.

We can't build a coalition of farmers and workers and be the ones who are the faces and the brains around them. We believe in our people, we believe in our workers, we believe in the farmers to be able to take their seat at the table. And to the point that one of the plantation directors, owners who became a good friend, actually even did away with management at one of his plantations and gave the plantation to the workers to own. So truly believe that and trust that if you're going to have the right intention, whether it's a coffee farmer who's barely had primary education, or whether it's a plantation owner who needs to make a mental switch to letting his worker have the seat at the table, that people have the capability to do that.

You just need to bring them together and create the space to do it. And simplify, simplify, simplify, and stay messy.

[00:10:40] Dominique: I love that. I feel like that was like 10 pieces of golden advice together, so thank you.

[00:10:45] Christy: I have a question and we just had this such a positive thing, Karimah, that you were talking about, and these outcomes of pulling people together through not seeking perfection. But there's also some hard parts in there in this work with, you know, you mentioned even safety. What is it like, what does it feel like in your body? How do you lead people when you know that there might be these dangerous situations? And then also how do you create a safe environment for everyone, not just your team, but everyone involved in the supply chain to bring people together? How do you achieve something like that?

[00:11:22] Karimah: I think one is just physical and temporal safety, and the other is psychological safety. And I'll be really honest, I think my safety threshold is very different than that of many people. At one point I was transiting through Taipei and talking to a taxi driver, and he was eating a fruit. And he said, do you want one? And I said, sure. And I came home and my husband said, what on earth did you do? Because he could have poisoned that fruit or drugged it. And I thought he didn't. My intuition said it was just a piece of fruit he was eating. It was like raw betel nut. And so would other people have gone to Pakistan with an Indian passport, and gone and worked with farmers and factories? Would other people have gone to Aceh right after the tsunami and gone into the mountains where there was no infrastructure?

I don't know. And there's people who have much more extreme tolerance, right? The journalists they go into war zones or people who go and serve in refugee situations or war situations. But I think maybe that's that root of being taught resilience early on and being taught to maybe not be stupid, but really be not be scared unnecessarily.

I think the psychological safety piece is, I actually, when I was in Bonn in December, I met with a number of my old colleagues from Fairtrade and a number of people from my team used to report to me, and one of my leaders from Vietnam actually made me cry because she said, I always use you as an example because you always care about the whole person.

Whether somebody's going through difficult time in their marriage or they need an extra moment because they've had a difficult childbirth and they need more time off, or whether it just looks like something's off in the moment and you just need a quiet conversation with somebody and then creating that type of connection. My rule of thumb always is have people that have worked in my team been more successful after being in my team and have they connected to each other even after not being in that team anymore. And by and large, they have.

My brain is thinking about right this second, it's thinking about success and defining success and of this movement. And yet one of the things you just said that is a success measure is did my people connect? Are they connecting with one another? And that's just, that's not something everyone thinks about as a success measure, and I think that is amazing. Thank you. People do the work. It's not the deck that does the work.

[00:13:40] Dominique: Karimah, one of the things that you mentioned earlier when we were talking about successes and measurement, you know, there were some qualitative stories like storytelling examples, but a lot of times your C-suite leaders rely on these numbers, very specific tables and such. You bring a really interesting background, professional and personal experiences. And a lot of what you do at Illumine Earth is how you're helping leaders to lead different.

[00:14:09] Christy: So my question to you is what lessons do you have from those experiences that you've had and how does that inform the work that you do with leaders at Illumine Earth today on systems change and measurement?

[00:14:21] Karimah: So I think there's two ways to answer that question. The first is, what do I do with individual leaders and how do I support individual leaders, whether it's within the community that I have called the Illumine Earth's ecosystem, or through the strategic advisory that I do one-on-one.

And it's a very simple trifecta of focusing on your personal leadership, on enterprise leadership, and on industry leadership with a thread of personal flourishing, going through it all. So personal leadership is really who are you? What do you love? What do you stand for? What are your purpose? What are your values?

Because if you don't have that straight, you can go anywhere, you can get steered anywhere. Even when you have an opportunity to do something different, you may not know whether it's aligned or not. The second piece, which I think a lot of leaders inside corporate who are leading sustainability and impact, as I mentioned, resist is stepping into their enterprise leadership role, right? Holding onto P&L's, speaking the language of the business, understanding what the quarterly results are about, what the pulse of the business is, what the business cycle is so that they can speak that language often. And I had to learn this the hard way.

 And I learned it with a lot of kind mentors and supporters is that you have to learn to speak the language of the business, the business will not learn to speak your carbon language. They may speak high level, but the minute you go into the details and the fuzziness, it'll be really challenging because people don't have time.

So learn to speak the language of the business. Learn to embody the mindset of the business, not so that you slow down to the pace of comfort for the business, i.e., not changing the business, but so that you can use the language of the business and use the business case to change. So, for example, when I made the business case for us to support the mapping for everybody on palm oil to make sure that everybody came together and mapped their supply chains onto one platform, it was a very easy sell.

Because it was a lot more expensive to do that one company by one company, and it was a lot cheaper and a lot easier, and a lot higher leverage for customer companies to have one platform to get their suppliers on. So very easy. The third piece is really industry leadership, and I, I'm a little afraid that with the exception of a few larger companies, this tends to drop off, right?

Industry leadership where you go to the conferences, you go to the events, you join the right coalitions to truly move the needle. And you don't just go to conferences to listen, but truly understand how you can move together, how you can teach others once you know and once you learn, but also then how do you actually then move the needle together?

Coalitions and industry associations are famous for being very slow, but they're slow only as long as their members and the people who play a role within them, the representatives of the companies accept that pace. Once company leaders come in to these coalitions, to industry associations, they can they can actually move things faster if they want to.

So truly, this is what I teach. But one thing that I do teach, which I was really bad at when I was in-house, both in Fairtrade and in corporate, both at Mondelez and Nike, was personal flourishing. I burnt myself out massively. I don't do that anymore. I had to unlearn that in this process of being able to teach others. And I don't think leaders burning out is good for the leader. I don't think it's good for the mandate. And so we actually put into personal flourishing practices like taking a pause, like meditating, like shutting your computer at a certain time at night because it's not good for your nervous system in order to be able to be highly functional as a personal enterprise and industry leader.

[00:17:45] Dominique: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love how holistic that approach is. I like how practical it is. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing all the amazing things you've been doing. Again, we said it last time, we could have actually seven episodes with just Karimah but sadly we only get to do two.

Karimah, I wanna close this out with a happy question. And I'm just curious really briefly, what is giving you hope right now?

[00:18:07] Karimah: Dreaming. I was taught to dream really, really big dreams and to make those dreams come true, and I've decided to dream of a near future where every sustainability leader inside a company is the most influential leader, is the most effective at transforming the business quickly. I am dreaming a dream where these leaders come together with each other and with impact companies and with NGOs and other stakeholders to change the world fast.

[00:18:34] Dominique: That was a beautiful answer. Thank you.

[00:18:36] Christy: It almost sounds like we should just stop right there because that was a great, great thing. Karimah, thank you so much. We're so glad that we had you today. Thank you for talking about flourishing leadership and modeling that through your different storytelling techniques and experiences.

And I hope I have this right. Go big, do it fast, do good things and then see and learn and keep going. Is that really what that's about, Karimah?

[00:19:00] Karimah: It is. You can, we still can, right? So one of the things that I hold very deeply in my heart, and I can say I, I dream a lot, right? But the reality is right now we're living in a very complex world. We've got political headwinds, we've got financial headwinds. We've got regulatory complexity that is next level.

And it's keeping people bogged down. And I really think if we just take a moment to step out, look up, look towards the horizon and say, out of all of this, what do I edit out? Whether it's the noise, whether it's the angst. Whether it's the agency to simplify something that looks over complicated and to call it out. And instead make room to flourish as a person so that I can find my allies, and that we can do big good fast.

Imagine what we could achieve.

[00:19:45] Christy: I love that. How can people connect with you or how can they be with you and advocate in this space?

[00:19:50] Karimah: Well, they can join the Illumine Earth ecosystem and they can follow me on LinkedIn if they're curious.

[00:19:55] Dominique: Perfect. Thank you so much, Karimah. Each guest brings a different perspective to sustainability. We're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others because climate action takes many forms.

[00:20:05] Christy: As always, you can find all of our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave 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.