John Coonrod is the executive vice president at The Hunger Project and is the co-founder and global coordinator of the Movement for Community-led Development. John was trained and was working as a research physicist when he became The Hunger Project’s first volunteer in 1977. At the height of the 1984 African famine, he made a career change, joining the staff of The Hunger Project. Today, John is an expert on bottom-up, gender-focused development and decentralized local governance and has been invited to lecture at the United Nations, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Princeton University, and the United States Air Force Academy.