Tag: WHES

Roundtable Summary: The Future of America’s Foreign Aid for Basic Education of Children

May 14, 2026     The Future of American Foreign Assistance for Basic Education was a roundtable held on June 12, 2025 among some forty-eight international education experts convened together over Zoom by the Global Coalition for Education-US, the Basic Education Coalition, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, George Washington University, and the World Hunger Education Service (WHES) – the publisher of Hunger Notes.

It sought to chart a path forward for America’s assistance to child education in lower and middle income countries.

It was held in the context of a major disruption to America’s ongoing support to basic education around the world.  The US had been the world’s largest bilateral donor for basic education, annually reaching over 34 million learners, training 2.9 million teachers, and distributing 174 million textbooks. Programs covered early grade reading, education in emergencies, disability inclusion, and teacher capacity building across more than 50 countries.  The abrupt termination in early 2025 of 163 of 165 USAID education programs decimated implementing organizations, cost nearly 20,000 American jobs, and prompted parallel cuts by other donors including the UK.

US comparative advantages in supporting basic education:  Participants identified early grade reading expertise, global field presence, strong higher education networks, convening power, catalytic leverage of donor funds, and leadership in evidence generation and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as areas where the US stands apart.

Key recommendations for future aid looking ahead 5-10 years:

  • Embed basic education within the restructured U.S. State Department programming for aid
  • Shift further toward locally-led, government-owned programs rather than parallel systems
  • Break down sectoral funding silos to enable whole-of-child approaches linking education, nutrition, and health
  • Expand the timelines of individual programs to ten years to allow systemic change
  • Invest in AI and technology while ensuring equity and accessibility
  • Preserve and publicly catalog institutional knowledge at risk of being lost.
  • Restore funding for education to FY2024 levels and comply with the Congressional READ Act

Participants agreed a follow-on roundtable should include voices from recipient-country governments and local organizations to complete the picture.  In the meantime, the sponsors have been conducting additional research, field interviews with local educational organizations, and planning additional publications.

Download the summary report here.

 

WHES Loses a Key Board Member

LINDA CRANDALL WORTHINGTON

1932-2019

 

Linda Crandall Worthington, 87, of Chevy Chase, MD, passed away on Sunday, October 20, 2019.

Over her lifetime, Linda was involved with a number of organization that serve the poor and hungry, including the World Hunger Education Service. Information about Linda has been drawn from her own Bio on our website.

Linda’s relationship with the World Hunger Education Service started at the beginning of WHES. In the 1970s, she worked with the founder of WHES, Pat Kutzner, on hunger seminars and publications, including editing several of the earliest print issues of Hunger Notes. She became a member of the Board of Directors in the mid-1990s and served as a Board member until 2017, and Emeritus thereafter. She was Board Secretary for most of that time. She edited and contributed articles for Hunger Notes. Her experience in a variety of situations where hunger was important, her experience in editing and publishing, her warmth and collegiality, and her ability to see a way forward for a small organization, played a major role in WHES’ existence and development over the years.

Most of the positions Linda held over the years have dealt with hunger and poverty in one form or fashion. These included:

In the 1990’s:

  • As senior editor for the now defunct DIVERSITY magazine, a publication on biodiversity that dealt a lot with agricultural research.
  • Co-director of the International Voluntary Services, an overseas development organization that placed volunteers in other countries.
  • Administrator for a small advocacy group called the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR).

During the 1970s, Linda worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. One of her most notable efforts was organizing and holding a seminar on Capitol Hill to look at food and hunger issues, based on the book, Food First, by Frances Moore Lappe. The conference included several congressmen as well as other prominent speakers on various aspects of the issue.

For 14 years, Linda lived overseas as a foreign service wife, in Vietnam from 1962-1965, then in Thailand for eight years. She later found out Dan Shaughnessy, a former WHES Board Chair, was also in Vietnam at that same time. She was also Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and remained there until his death in 1981.

For the past twenty years, Linda had been a writer/editor for the United Methodist Church’s Baltimore-Washington regional office and wrote stories and articles for the bimonthly newspaper, the UMConnection, for the Web site, and was editor and writer of the weekly e-connection.

Linda was employed occasionally as an editor and did several projects one place or another.

  • In Senegal she worked as the administrative assistant and coordinator for a large multi-country nutrition project that brought together officials from several francophone countries to talk about “nutrition planning.”
  • She researched and wrote on the effects of the sale of Nestle products on poor people. Her work took her into the worst slums of Bangkok to interview women.

Linda had received her B.S. in Social Work and English from Kalamazoo College, and her M.A. in Theology from Wesley Theological Seminary. Linda started more graduate work at Michigan State in Anthropology and Sociology but went overseas before writing the dissertation.

She is the mother of four grown children. Linda was an active member of a United Methodist Church, held membership in the United Methodist Association of Communicators and the Religious Communicators Association and was vice president of the International Voluntary Services Alumni Association. In  2019 she was awarded the Harry Denman Award for Evangelism.

Linda traveled to more than 35 countries in five continents, many of which were work missions. Some of Linda’s leisure time was spent as a member of a league of duckpin bowlers.

Linda’s contributions to World Hunger Education Service were innumerable and will she will be dearly missed by those who worked with her at World Hunger Education Service, as well as many other who are working to address hunger and poverty.

A link to Linda’s obituary may be found here.