Heart Centered Work at the Texas Department of Agriculture
By Melissa Hield / The Rag Blog / March 25, 2025
People’s History in Texas posted the following story on Substack. It is a timely reminder of what can be achieved by government. Mariann Wizard Vasquez, for whom a GoFundMe appeal was made in the previous post, features prominently in this historical recollection.
[In 1985, Ethiopia experienced the first of several famines. In 1985, it was a massive drought. 1985 was also the height of a farm crisis in the United States. Small farmers in Texas were being forced off their land due to slumping prices for commodity crops.
LiveAid was a huge worldwide fundraiser for Ethiopia. It was enormously successful. Jim Hightower, Commissioner of Agriculture in Texas, and Susan De Marco watched the show. They saw a way to solve two problems at the same time. Project Tejas was born.]
PHIT interviewed Mariann Wizard-Vasquez, Austin activist, organizer, and journalist, now retired and living in Belize, about the Texas Department of Agriculture’s hugely successful Project Tejas that sent Texas surplus grain and powdered milk directly to Ethiopian families.
Mariann spelled out Hightower’s thought process. “We’ve got all this surplus food right here in Texas. We should be feeding those children. We can send Texas grain and Texas milk direct from a Texas port to Africa.”
In the spring of 1985, Mariann was looking for a new job. A friend pointed out a seductive ad that was listed in the Austin American Statesman, “Person wanted for a non-profit fundraising project.”
The non-profit was Save the Children, an international non-profit organization.
Mariann called the number in the ad and met with Bob (whose last name has been lost to the archives), an executive from Save the Children, the international non-profit, in a coffee shop in a hotel just south of the river.
“Save the Children had been in conversation with Jim Hightower about an Ethiopian famine project. Save the Children agreed to work with the Department of Agriculture with the proviso that Save the Children would have its own representative involved in the day-to-day work. Hightower would provide office space and supplies for a representative, and that representative would have charge of the money raised.”
Mariann was that representative. “For a year and a half, my job was counting money and making bank deposits. It rolled in, heaps of checks, money bags, lunch bags, and paper sacks filled with pennies, nickels, and dimes. School children gave their pocket money.
Bags of cash appeared on my desk every day. I added it all up and deposited it in the bank.”
The school children, the ones that were coming in from the classes, the little box wrapped up with a rubber band. You’d open it up and start counting pennies, nickels and dimes. Those were the most touching. I could get 10 checks for $5,000 but then there’d be some little bag with children’s grubby milk money; that would be the one that stuck with me.
“Jim insisted from the beginning that Save the Children identify exactly where these items were going to go, and that the delivery and distribution there be documented.”
“Most aid organizations don’t work like that. You give your contribution, they assemble supplies, they get it there, they get it distributed where their trucks are able to get to.”
Jim said, “Nope, I want pictures from every village, the name of the village, and where it is on a map.”
Bags were printed with the Project Tejas and Save the Children logo.
“I want them to know it came from Texas. That’s what I think motivated a lot of people to contribute, to get involved—because we could track it.”
Texas farm and ranch groups, and students, parents, and staff in more than 140 schools in 75 school districts, participated in fund-raising. Twelve villages in northern Ethiopia were selected to receive grain and powdered milk via Project Tejas. Fundraising by the schools raised more than $125,000. Altogether, in 1985, Project Tejas raised more than 1 million dollars.
“When we got ready to start sending relief supplies, I started writing checks. I wrote a check to the Texas Grain Producers Association for one million dollars and signed it.”
In 1986 Hightower expanded the focus of Project Tejas.
“Jim’s whole philosophy, and Willie Nelson’s as well, says you can’t just be giving people food, you have to help them be able to successfully grow their own food. People had killed off their farm animals to eat. They didn’t have any chickens left; they killed all these animals off, so their kids didn’t starve. They did not have wells, or the well was not deep enough or had gone dry, or the wellhead collapsed because it wasn’t made properly in the first place.” The villages needed farm tools, water well protection and water catchments, oxen, and grain storage warehouses. TDA raised more than $200,000 in 1986 for these infrastructure needs.
Looking back, Mariann emphasized “We made a real difference in children’s lives at a crucial time. The problems, especially in Africa are endemic and continue to this day. Some people might say well, it didn’t really do any good in the long run. I choose to believe that we did do some good in the long run, that some of the children whose lives we improved or saved went on to do things themselves to improve other people’s lives. No way of knowing that, that’s just my Pollyanna self.”
Groups like Save the Children and countless others are now being advised that Federal Money will no longer be available.
Could we dream of a Texas State Agency that could step and provide guidance and assistance in these troubled times?
We can dream.
But making it actually happen is probably going to require a bit more advocacy.
Remind them of Project Tejas. We did it once. We could do it again.
View Hightower’s 1986 speech on expanding the Ethiopia aid to infrastructure.
Please return the support of a loving community to Mariann. The previous RagBlog post has more information. A GoFundMe campaign is underway. Give if you can.
