In this episode, host Todd Manwaring interviews Kurt Bowen, Executive Director of New Seed (Semilla Nueva), to uncover how biofortified corn is transforming the fight against global malnutrition. Instead of trying to change diets, New Seed strengthens them—using non-GMO, nutrient-rich corn that boosts child health, raises farmer incomes, and scales sustainable food security across Guatemala and beyond.

Key Moments & Timestamps

0:00 | Introduction

1:43 | Meet Curt Bowen
Introduction to Curt Bowen, Founder and Executive Director of Semilla Nueva

5:03 | Why Malnutrition Is So Hard to Solve
Malnutrition is often invisible but has long-term impacts on health, cognitive development, and economic potential.

10:02 | Changing Diets Doesn’t Work—So Try This Instead
Curt and Todd discuss how efforts to change cultural food habits often fail—and why working with those habits instead of against them is far more effective.

10:41 | The Aha Moment: Nutrient-Rich Corn Exists
Curt describes how researchers found naturally nutrient-rich corn varieties and how Semilla Nueva used traditional breeding—not GMOs—to enhance their benefits.

15:05 | The Key: Aligning Farmer Incentives
Getting farmers to adopt new seeds required not just better nutrition, but also higher yields and affordability. Curt explains how Semilla Nueva redesigned its approach to meet those needs.

18:29 | Don’t Just Name the Problem—Understand It Deeply
Todd and Curt discuss the importance of digging deeper into social problems, beyond surface-level assumptions, to design effective solutions.

21:26 | From 30,000 to Millions: Scaling the Impact
Curt outlines Semilla Nueva’s growth and future goals: reaching 100,000 families next year and eventually 100 million people.

25:58 | How Semilla Nueva Tests for Real Impact
From early mistakes to rigorous RCTs, Curt shares how measurement and humility have helped their model evolve into something truly effective.

31:20 | What Makes a Great Nonprofit?
Todd summarizes Semilla Nueva as a model organization: focused on understanding the problem, using evidence, and testing results with counterfactuals.

35:50 | How You Can Help Semilla Nueva
Curt outlines three ways listeners can contribute:

1. Review and give feedback on their 10-year scale plan

2. Help them tell their story better

3. Recommend great candidates for their growing team in Guatemala and beyond

37:52 | Impact Opportunity: Semilla Nueva
Jaxson Thomas recaps the episode’s key takeaways and explains how Semilla Nueva uses biofortification to fight malnutrition in a scalable, sustainable way. Listeners are invited to support via donation or their UI Charitable DAF.

40:59 | Impact Inbox: What is an RCT?
Jaxson answers a listener question: what’s a Randomized Controlled Trial, and why is it so important in high-impact philanthropy?

Episode Transcript

Curt Bowen - Bill Gates always says, if he had a magic wand and he could fix just one thing in the world, it would be malnutrition.

Malnutrition is one of the hardest problems, in terms of global poverty because there  are all of these long-term impacts that you don't feel right away.

And so you end up with kids that don't grow in terms of height, they're really really short, their brains don't fully develop. And that affects everything later on in life. They're less able to hold jobs. It's just kind of like every aspect that you think makes a full and flourishing life can be really held back based on what's happening at this very early stage.

Todd Manwaring - Welcome to the Impact Innovations Podcast presented by UI Charitable, where we help you become a more impactful philanthropist. This is episode eight. I'm your host, Todd Manwaring. 

You just heard a short clip from our conversation where Curt Bowen, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Semilla Nueva explains how they're tackling chronic malnutrition with a surprisingly simple yet powerful solution. Instead of trying to change what people do, Semilla Nueva builds on what people already do, tweaking it slightly. And the results are incredible.

Later, after the interview, we will dive into how you can support Semilla Nueva. And stick around to the end. We'll wrap up with a question about randomized controlled trials or RCTs from one of our listeners that you won't want to miss.

We're excited, Curt, to have you here with us and helping us understand the incredible impacts that you're having with your organization.

Curt Bowen - Thank you so much, Todd. It's a huge pleasure to be here.

Todd Manwaring - Tell us, to start off, tell us a bit about your story. You've been working on this for quite some time. You know your connection to Guatemala and other areas, some of the connection to malnutrition. Give us a bit of a perspective of why you got involved and how Semilla Nueva moved into this malnutrition perspective.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, I mean, I think the easiest place to start is, you know, in terms of who I am and where I came from, is definitely a little bit about my parents. My mom was a bit of an activist and a youth educator in the Catholic Church, and my dad did a lot of work in tech startups. And I think I ended up kind of getting both pieces. Like, on one hand, this mindset towards like, how do I build something new that hasn't been around before that can disrupt things and create new things? When I would hang out with my dad on weekends when he was working weekends and startup land. And my mom was hyper focused on how do we make the world a better place? How do we take care of the people who you know our faith asked us to take care of? And it was the kind of the combination of those two things that I think left me being susceptible to stumbling onto that kind of need and then wanting to do something about it.

And so I ended up going to Central America for the first time in college after my freshman year and went down to build a house with a friend. And I think it's one thing to read about those things. It's another thing to be like walking through rural villages and just being so blown away by how different people's lives were. 

I think like anybody who grows up in the Rocky Mountain West, there's a little bit of a bootstrappy kind of mentality of you can always make your own way and the world's always full of opportunities and it's up to you to go make it happen. And I think when you end up in a place like rural Guatemala or rural Honduras, you can see that a lot of possibilities that we take for granted just aren't available to a lot of people. And yeah, I think it opened up this calling for me to be like, how do I make sure that no matter where somebody is born, they have a chance at a really, really good life?

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, that can be so transformational seeing how other people live, what that looks like. And like you say, in some ways feeling like, my gosh, how blessed I am, but I should be sharing. I should be participating. I love how you mentioned, you know, heeding that call of faith. That's an interesting perspective. And the tie to your father, the startup that obviously you've been involved in here and for quite some time. 

The focus is for Semilla Nueva, New Seed, right? I don't know if that's translated any differently than those. 

Curt Bowen - Yeah, yeah, we're actually starting to go for the new seed actually as the name. Yeah.

Todd Manwaring - Okay, all right. Help me understand that perspective of a mother and child. I saw that repeatedly on your website trying to help mothers and children. Give me that perspective of what malnutrition looks like and how it changes with the seeds that you're producing and that they're adding into their food intake. What does that look like?

Curt Bowen - Yeah, so malnutrition is one of the hardest problems, if not the hardest problem in terms of global poverty. Bill Gates always says, like, if he had a magic wand and he could fix just one thing in the world, because it's been so hard for him to try to fix, it would be malnutrition.

And the reason it's so hard is because there are all of these kind of unintuitive long-term impacts that you don't feel right away.

So if you are a Guatemalan mother and you have your infant, you're going to be culturally raised to feed them little bits of corn tortillas and corn tamales. And like, that's just what culture has been doing for thousands of years.

And the unfortunate thing is that that food source, what is kind of like the Mayan version of baby food, just doesn't have the protein, the iron, the zinc, the nutrients that that little child needs to be able to fully develop. Those first thousand days, our brain is changing more than any other period in our lives. And it needs all the right stuff to be able to really, really grow. And not only the brain, but the body.

And so you end up with kids that don't grow in terms of height, they're really short, and their brains don't fully develop. And that affects everything later on in life. They’ve done studies that show that those kids earn a lot less money, they're less able to hold jobs. It's just kind of like every aspect that you think makes a full and flourishing life can be really held back based on what's happening at this very early stage. And it's not obvious.

Right? Like if you're working on helping people be less poor, you can see that tangibly and people want it tangibly. But being able to think about how do I make sure that this kid has what it needs so that it's going to live a good life 30 years from now, 50 years from now, et cetera. It's a lot more. Invisible. And I think that's one of the things that draws me to the field is looking at kind of like the most neglected causes, the most hard to fix problems, because there are some really extreme cases, like there's kids who are so malnourished that they have deformed bodies and, you know, they die and they're way more likely to get diarrhea. 

All of that's true as well, but there's this whole other element of caring about the long-term life of just tens and hundreds of millions of children. And like, how do we actually make a difference at this super, super big scale?

Todd Manwaring - That makes so much sense. And I think one of the things that really caught with what Semilla Nueva is doing was this idea that we've been trying to work on nutrition for so many years, for decades with people around the globe. And it's difficult, no matter what the intervention is, it's difficult to get people to change behaviors.

And so one of the things that I've heard from you is it's mentioning the idea of, just like you said, well, this woman, she learned for all her life and for years before, culturally this is what I'm going to feed my child.

And so instead trying to figure out a way to have the grains that she's using to be more nutritious, to have more protein, to have more iron like you're mentioning zinc and these other kinds of things. Tell us about that perspective and how that switch came about, I guess, with Semilla Nueva and how you saw things.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so Guatemala has the fifth highest rate of malnutrition in the world, which is striking. Like you'd imagine this is like something that exists in like the worst parts of Africa, and it does, but it also is in Guatemala…

Todd Manwaring - Just because it's so lush and you imagine people would have ample food. Is that what you're kind of driving at?

Curt Bowen - Yeah, I mean, it's just hard to think that a country that is like, it's like Mexico's Mexico, it's like right below Mexico, it's like one of the number one sources of immigrants in the United States, it's a country we're so connected to. And you would imagine that these really terrible humanitarian problems wouldn't be on our doorstep. And they are. And we got really interested in trying to figure out how can we fix this.

The first step was we did what everybody does, which is like how do we convince these very very poor very rural families that they should just eat a better diet. Right. It's like, you know knocking on people's doors and be like, "Hey, turns out your diet sucks. You should do something better." And people don't like that message people might not trust that message and also telling somebody that they need to go eat a lot more meat and vegetables and stuff that costs a whole lot more than corn is really tough if you just can't afford it.

Curt Bowen - And we tried to get people to grow different foods, but they wouldn't necessarily taste super good. And it was just a whole problem.

And during that whole trajectory, we learned that there were some scientists that had kind of naturally found, like they found in random corn fields, corn plants that just had a whole lot more nutrition. Like they were a complete protein, like eggs. They had more iron and zinc, which are two of the most important things for healthy kids, for their immune system, for their brain development. And it was just in the corn.

And so that was like the aha moment, like what if instead of trying to get rid of this thing, to be like your ancestral food's bad, what if we could just make it better?

Todd Manwaring - Right, right.

Curt Bowen - And that super appealed to me. And it made me think about my mom, right? She went through this period where she was trying to get us to eat a bunch of tofu. That was her mom thing when we were all seven. So she was like, I'm gonna make tofu pudding. I'm gonna sneak the tofu into your enchiladas that you really like. She found the ways of disguising the thing that she thought we needed into the thing we wanted. And so it was the same thing. How do we just get a kind of corn that just naturally has that good stuff?

Todd Manwaring - Right. And so in some ways it needs to taste good, right?

Curt Bowen - has to taste good. 

Todd Manwaring - Because it has to be something that they want to keep consuming. And then obviously it's got to be beneficial for the farmer to produce it. And so it seems like both those kinds of angles need to be in play. And I can certainly see what you're saying. I mean, I would like to change my diet. It would be better for my health. And I know that.

But that behavior change is so difficult. 

Curt Bowen - It's so tough.

Todd Manwaring - And so providing a different mechanism that makes so much more sense in many ways.

Curt Bowen - You know, and it's funny, I think the biggest thing I've learned from living in a developing country for 15 years is that people are people.

You know, like I would sometimes be in like a Rotary Club in Eastern Idaho and like Rigby or Rexburg. People would ask me and be like, well, “Why don't you just tell them to eat more nutritious food?” And I'm like, hey man, how many times do you floss a day? Cause like your dentist thinks you should floss three times a day. Are you going to do it just cause I told you to? Like, no, like it's annoying. It's hard.

We're all the same thing and like we have so much willpower to make changes in our lives. We want the best for like our families like we're all pretty similar as human beings and so I get really into the things where it's like what at a systemic level can I do that'll make the right thing the easiest and the best and the most like tasty thing

Todd Manwaring - And I like what you said. You're mentioning in many ways, and maybe this is something we should point out. This is a natural process. Scientists were finding corn that had higher proteins, had these higher micronutrients in it. And you aren't using a GMO process. You're actually breeding the corn so that you bring these different tastes in as well as the nutrients.  And so it's bio, what is it? Is that the right word? Biofortified. Yeah.

Curt Bowen - Biofortified, yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, what's tricky is in a lot of the countries that have really high malnutrition rates, countries where like most of the kids are dying, GMOs are still not legal.

And so you can get to a more nutritious corn seed by genetically modifying it. It's faster, it's easier, but it's not legal in most of the places that we really care about. And so we focused on a different strategy, which was how do we do this the slower old fashioned natural way to be able to develop seeds that didn't have those, those issues?

Like I'm personally not against GMOs. If they're scientifically proven to be safe, like awesome. I think there's a lot of potential there, but given how controversial it can be, It was easier to just sidestep it all together and be like, cool, let's focus on natural breeding.

And so yeah, we have these like good seeds and there's all these studies all around the world proving that these seeds with higher protein quality or with iron or zinc do improve the growth of kids. They are healthier. And we just know too, like if you get more protein in iron and zinc into little kids who are malnourished it's like really really good for them.

And so there's like this whole body of literature saying this is this is the right thing to do and I think what what made us different is we kind of figured out how a lot of people who are doing it around the world we didn't feel we're doing it in a good way like they were investing a lot of money but they weren't getting enough farmers to use these seeds

And so I think kind of our innovation as an organization was trying to change the strategy to get these more nutritious seeds to farmers.

And as you mentioned, the primary way that we figured out to do that was through making them higher yields. 

Again, people are people, you have to align incentives. And so we would, when we first started, we'd have these like super nutritious corn seeds and they didn't yield quite as much as the best seeds in the market, but like they were kind of good. And we go to farmers and be like, your kids are super important. Plant these seeds, take better care of your kids. And farmers would maybe try them for a year and then they would stop. 

And so we would do nutrition lessons and we would do classes and we would try to educate people. And I think as soon as you hear somebody be like, we have to educate people, you realize how annoying it is when someone has to educate you. 

And so just like, it was really tough. And we realized that what farmers really cared about was getting more corn, that's their primary crop. They wanna sell that corn to be able to have money to put their kids into school or to expand their house, like whatever, like that is their source of income. So if we could come up with seeds that were super nutritious and had way higher yields than all of these super poor corn farmers, which is what most rural people are, they're all corn farmers, could get a lot more income, they would love that and the seeds would just take off. And that became the strategy.

Todd Manwaring - Right. That makes so much sense. I mean, when I, when I hear you describing this, really one of the things that seems like you've really learned is, what are the incentives? What's that incentive for the mother bringing this into my home using this? What's the incentive for the farmer? Of course, it's going to be the seed price. It's going to be the yield. All of those kinds of things combine in order to make this kind of program work. 

And I love how you mentioned, you know, yeah, so we're not doing GMO because that thwarts part of that process. People won't use it. People may not eat it. And so instead we're using this natural process as a way to meet the families and the farmers where they're at. Yeah, really important.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, how do you make the right thing the easiest thing? How do you make it the tastiest thing? How do you make it the most economically beneficial thing? I think it's like where so many charities have gone wrong is, A, we try to tell people what to do and convince them that we know the best path for them. 

And B, we forget that people are driven by pretty standard incentives throughout the world and like how can you tap into those? 

And if you do that, it takes off. And if it's not taking off, it's not people's fault, it's yours. Like you should go get better at offering something. I think that's probably like the tech, you know, startup kind of chip that came from my dad. You know, it's like if you're not getting customer adoption, like that's on you, go figure it out.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, no, that is interesting. I think you're right. I think a lot of people are trying in many ways, sometimes forcing a bit too much instead of really understanding the problem. 

Here, as a professor previous to being at UI Charitable, one of the things I recognize working with a lot of charities is they didn't really deeply understand the problem.

And so for instance, they would say, yeah, the problem's malnutrition. And they would move on from there. And in your case, yes, that's part of the problem. But part of the problem is behavior change issues. Part of the problem is the taste. Part of the problem, right, it's recognizing that this social problem is more complex, it has lots of pieces to it. 

And so by doing that, then you're able to change your perspective on, well we think our theory was wrong before we were doing this. Now our theory is if we do this, we'll have better outcomes. We'll actually be changing children's lives, these infants and mothers, and that makes so much sense.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, and it's crazy, because I mean, I feel like it's like you just have to ask why, what is it, like seven times or something?

Todd Manwaring - Mm-hmm, right? That Toyota mechanism, yeah.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, yeah, and you start to learn these different things. And then once you've kind of built your chain of why's, like why is this problem? Like I go visit Guatemala and I see these like super poor kids and like people are living in really poor houses. And like, if I ask why enough, I'll figure out some, an interesting theory for how I could make a difference there.

And then it's like you gotta go test it. And oftentimes if you're really, if you can detach yourself from your own moral superiority enough to see where what you're doing isn't working and be like really, really attuned to how you're essentially failing, like how you're not getting what you wanna get done, you can like learn what the next idea could be. And I think that there's something really beautiful about that process. 

Because I think a lot of us who work in the social world can have really big egos. You can feel very morally superior because you're doing good for the world. And there's nothing worse for doing good for the world than a big ego.

Todd Manwaring - Right and acting that way rather than being vulnerable is what I'm hearing you say and being humble as you approach what's going on.

Curt Bowen - Yeah, so I think it's been important for us to fail so many times and we have, like we have failed every failure is out of lesson but like we started off trying to teach people to do gardens that was not gonna move the needle on malnutrition. We started off with corn seeds that were nutritious but didn't have high yields that didn't work. We came up with seeds that actually were pretty good on yield but they were too expensive so we had to go figure that out like you're constantly iterating but like

What's allowing you to keep going with that process is that it's for something that's so good. Like it's for this idea. And I think we have this dream. There's a billion people on this planet that eat corn three times a day. And that's where most of the malnutrition is going to be in the next 50 to 80 years.

Asia's figuring their stuff out. Like people eat rice and wheat. Those countries are getting their stuff together.

And it's like super poor people in Africa and places like Guatemala eating corn. This is where this crisis of kids dying of diarrheal disease is gonna be. And so, you know, it could take a while, but like let's keep chipping away. Let's keep chipping away. We did that for 15 years. 

And I think we're finally at that point where it's like really, really catching and 30,000 families last year, 50,000 families this, we're hoping for 100,000 families next year.

This year, I'm hoping we'll feed about two million people. That's how much corn will get produced by those families and hopefully we'll hit three or four million next year. So like it's finally catching, but it just takes so long of trying and learning.

Todd Manwaring - Right. And getting to that point, I noticed that in some of your places on your website, I also noticed in some of your LinkedIn posts, you talk about really a 10 year plan, goal of reaching 100 million people. When you look at that, what else do you think needs to change? 

Are you still working on, yeah, we need to find a better seed. Is it also, we've got to connect governments better or other large entities, maybe even larger seed companies, or you know, what is it that's going to drive that scale that you think at the moment? And obviously it's going to change between now and 10 years, but what do you see that's going to allow that to happen?

Curt Bowen - Yeah, one thing... So I think one way to answer that question is to kind of give a big perspective of what's going on with these billion people who are eating corn three times a day. Because like that's where we want to get to, that's where we want to fix. And that billion people who are eating corn three times a day are getting all that corn from about 53 million small farmers and those are scattered throughout Africa, parts of Asia, and a lot of Latin America. 

And so the question becomes, how do we get 53 million smallholder farmers, or like a chunk of them, to use these more nutritious seeds? And what we've narrowed in on, and it's kind of like a bigger version of what we're doing in Guatemala, is like number one, find the best seeds in the world and get really good at naturally breeding the nutrition into them.

So like, you know can kind of see this with Ford and electric cars, right? They're like, don't go build a cyber truck. Like find the car, like the F-150 that everybody already loves and just make that sucker electric. Like that's a pretty good way of doing things. 

Todd Manwaring - It's a good analogy. Yeah.

Curt Bowen - Yeah. And so, you know, we're kind of doing the same thing. It's like figure out all the people who develop seeds around the world and get really good at working with them to just be like, let's free the nutrition. So the seeds that you sell and will sell into the future can just have all this nutrition. And then work with other NGOs and governments to support those seed companies making that transition. 

And I think you can see this electric cars as well, where for a long time there was like a tax credit that, you know, the US government and governments all around the world would basically knock a chunk off the price for electric cars.

And that has led to a lot of increased adoption until there's a point where you don't need that subsidy anymore. And we basically do a similar thing. We want the seeds to be super nutritious for the poorest farmers so that they can nourish their entire country. So let's get really good at making the seeds nutritious and let's work with nonprofits and governments to put a small subsidy on them to make the super nutritious seeds that are really good also the cheapest seeds. And then the market just takes care of it.

That's what's super cool. So that's what we're doing in Guatemala. It's what we're doing in El Salvador now. And we're developing the seeds for East Africa. And the hope is, you know, six or seven countries having that system in place within 10 years, there'll be about a hundred million people that are far better off in terms of their health than their development and their mood and just everything.

As a result and then hopefully another like five or seven years and we'll get to a billion. That's kind of the dream.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, that's exciting. That's a good dream. How do some of these tests come into that? I know that you're involved in some randomized control trials. You've obviously been testing and testing perspectives with people. What does that look like. To me it sounds like maybe this is something you're constantly doing. You're constantly testing this with a farmer. You're testing this with ⁓ the consumer.

And you're also saying, oh, and let's understand scientifically, is this really changing malnutrition, stunting, you know, different kinds of things? Is that really a constant piece of who you are?

Curt Bowen - Yeah, it's so deep. It is so insanely deep. I mean, I think it's like why, you know, when I first went to Guatemala, I was like 21 to start the organization. Like I thought I was all about the environment, like everything to be organic and like, you know, I came in like very lefty on a lot of stuff.

And I started measuring, we started out at the very beginning measuring how does this technology impact farmers? And realized like a lot of organic stuff was making the farmers poorer. So we stopped it, like within a year we're like, this is a terrible plan, let's do something different. But it's because you measure, if you don't measure, you can't know. And there's something like that data makes us accountable to, which again, I think helps for pushing the ego aside.

It’s not like this technique or this particular seed is me and if it fails it's like I am a failure. You're like no we try the thing we'll learn if it fails we'll do something better and you just iterate and iterate and iterate.

And so yeah I think we launch new seeds every year or two and we are testing everything about them all the time. We find over a hundred farmers who planted our seed and their normal seed like right next to each other on the same field and the same input, same fertilizer and we'll harvest both and so we have on an annual basis this idea of how much higher or lower yielding are our seeds than all the major seeds in the market or like the know heirloom old seeds farmers are using. 

We have that data and that helps guide us for things like what is the next seed we're gonna launch and it helps us quantify for our donors how much extra money are we making for farmers.

In the last couple years we've been around like for every dollar we receive in donations, we're making farmers incomes go up by like 50 cents to a dollar. So we're pretty close. We're hoping that next year we finally break over that. We're like, even if you're ignoring nutrition, our seeds, it's still better for you to give our NGO money to go work with farmers than if you just directly donated the money to the farmer. And to me, that's always the first thing any charity in the developing world should test. And then on top of that, there's the whole nutrition thing.

And the nutrition thing is, that's our whole reason for existence, is to make sure kids are nourished. And so we need to know, is the extra nutrition in our corn actually making kids healthier? And there's a whole bunch of scientific ways of doing that. I think what's tough in the NGO world is we're super reliant on stories.

And so I could tell you a story about one kid who ate the corn and then they started acing their tests in school and now they're super successful and Harvard gave them the scholarship, you know, but I would have to put a little asterisk at the bottom of that story. You know, results not typical, like results may vary. And that's the thing I don't want to do. Like I don't like doing that. I want to use the data to understand what's happening for you know, for everybody and like what the real trends are and the average farmer and the average kid.

And so that limits the kind of data we can collect because there's only certain things we can collect and like actually get to be statistically significant. And so we focus on that. We work with scientists at Cornell and UC Denver has a great team and we've done some work with the Paris School of Economics.

And we're looking at if you measure nutritional status in the body of a two-year-old or an 18-month-old or like a new mother who's nursing, what can you look at, say, like in a blood sample to understand what's going on for them nutritionally? And if they eat our corn for six months, what happens?

And so you end up with like these huge groups where you'll find like a hundred families and like half of the corn seed and the other half don't. And you're, you know, checking before they start eating and then you're doing blood samples, you know, four months later and like six months later with them and their kids. And you start to get really cool data showing like, yes, these bodies are absorbing this nutrition. They're healthier. Like their biomarkers are better and that's really cool. 

So we've done two of those studies. One is getting ready to be published. And that's the one we did with Cornell and the other one with UC Denver, like all the field work was done. Now that's getting analyzed and in the lab in Denver and will hopefully get published mid next year.

Todd Manwaring - That's awesome. I love how that's really connecting and it sounds like helping them understand better ways to measure this as well and how we look at malnutrition as a whole. You know, not just in this situation but in others.

You know, it's interesting just hearing you talk about this. You're our poster child for what we try to talk to our donors about. And when we try to explain, you know, what does the best organization look like? What is it that that social impact organization does? And for us, we're very cognizant on three things. 

One, that organization really takes the time to understand what the real problems are and continues to do that forever. They never stop because they're constantly learning and you've mentioned that. 

The second thing is that the organization is finding and utilizing evidence that actually gives feedback back into that system. So they understand the problem better. They alter their perspectives on what's going on and that becomes very much a learning cycle that occurs again and again. 

And really the third thing that we're looking for are organizations that care enough that they're actually taking time to do these counterfactual studies like you're describing. And we know those are more expensive. They take you know, longer to be able to pull together. But on the other hand, without that, you don't quite know exactly what's happening. 

And I like how you mentioned, yeah, we're really interested in this for the average family. Because with every intervention, you're going to get some people whose health in this case really increases, others who their increase is maybe, you know, not as much and others where it might even be hurting in some way.

But your goal is let's get more people into that healthy side and really changing that whole perspective. And this is a mantra that we continually talk about is this is what makes a great organization is that humility, that willingness to continue to strive for even having greater impact. I love how you've described this story perspective of what you're up to.

Curt Bowen - Thank you, Todd. No, and it's nice to feel aligned on that. I mean, it's, I think it's something that you naturally come to if you've been engaging with the sector for a long time and really deeply care about it.

Because it's so easy, right? I think when we all start, whatever the thing is that pulls us into deeply caring about people and some of the hardest spots in the world, you find that one story, that one idea, and you fall in love with it, and anything that challenges it you're kind of not happy with, and it takes a lot of time before you can disconnect from a specific tactic or strategy or story in order to always go back to that bigger picture. 

It's not about whether these new pumps for wells in Africa is the thing that's gonna totally change the world, or whether it's these water filters, or whether it's the corn seeds, or whether it's these solar panels. There's a whole bunch of different things you can do, but what matters is the impact.

And being able to constantly see that even something that worked 10 years ago might not work now. But you gotta keep up with it. You gotta be constantly checking in on here's the people who tried it, here's the people who didn't, what happened to both of them, run the math. 

Yeah, I think it's so key to our identity as an organization. And it's cool, because I think once you've really invested in that culture, and that kind of like way of being, it actually does bring a lot of peace. It's like that whole, the truth will set you free. You know, it's, you don't have to be worried about, as worried about like, how do I position this or how do I frame this? 

I mean, you always have to do that to a certain extent, just in life and communication in general, but like so much less. You're just like, here's the data, here's what we learned but if you have a better way to do this, let us know. We're super open to it. We'll be the first ones to try the new thing. But here's exactly where it is. Here's how we measured it. Here's where it's stuck.

Todd Manwaring - Yeah, I like that. To wrap up, give us a quick perspective. ⁓ As we interact with funders of all types, when you look at the connection of different resources, whether it's funding, whether it's people sharing your story, what is the greatest need that Semilla Nueva has? What would you suggest to someone? Yeah, boy, if you'd like to help, here's two great ways to participate. What would that be?

Curt Bowen - I mean, one, we're working right now on really honing in that plan for the next 15 years and that plan for how we want to get to a billion people. And we have some cool documents on that and we'd be happy to share and would love to get feedback. I think that's number one. I'll give you three. 

Number two, sometimes I think the downside of the more wonky, you know, data-driven kind of brain is that like, you know, you can not be the best at telling the story. And I think folks that want to help us get that story out there and help us hone it in a way that it can be more shareable, I think would be awesome. 

And then number three to just keep us in mind, we're always, as we grow, we're oftentimes looking to hire and find really, really good talent, especially folks who want to be in Guatemala full-time, eventually be in Africa full-time. I think those are the three.

Todd Manwaring - That's fantastic. Well, hopefully we'll find some of those people and nudge them your way. I think it sounds exciting what you're doing and congratulations on being able to work on this and pull this together. Thanks, Curt, for being here with us today.

Curt Bowen - Thank you so much, Todd.

Jaxson Thomas - This is your co-host Jaxson Thomas with this month's Impact Opportunity. You just heard an engaging conversation between Todd Manwaring and Curt Bowen, executive director of Semilla Nueva, a nonprofit focused on ending malnutrition.

In certain parts of the world, malnutrition persists simply because the food available and the diet that is culturally present isn't as nutritious as it could be. One of these places is Guatemala, where corn or maize is a primary dietary component.

A lack of nutritious food at an early age can lead to a lot of different problems, including stunted growth, disease, long-term health problems, and eventually economic mobility, just to name a few.

Semilla Nueva is tackling this problem by starting at the root causes, literally. Rather than introducing new types of food, changing diets or habits, Semilla Nueva is taking the staple food of corn, which previously provided little to no nutritious value and infused it with much needed vitamins, minerals and nutrients through a natural process called biofortification.

Farmers and families can keep farming the way they were farming and eating what they were eating, only now it's healthier and they're earning more. Here's how it works.

Semilla Nueva has found naturally occurring high nutrient corn through corn breeding and has developed a new corn seed that tastes better, has higher yields, is cheaper and most importantly has that nutritious value that's so needed. Semilla Nueva works with seed retailers and government agencies to get these high quality seeds into farms of rural farmers all across Guatemala.

And the results of these efforts are clear and compelling. In 2024 alone, they've reached 30,881 farmers and are continuing to grow year over year.

Farmers using Semilla Nueva's seeds earn on average 76% more compared to the seeds they were using before. RCTs or randomized control trials are currently being held and are showing strong signs of huge health benefits and improving biomarkers for children and mothers that are using Semilla Nueva's new and improved seeds.

Semilla Nueva is currently working in Guatemala and is expanding to El Salvador, Haiti and southern Mexico. They're also developing a new variant of seeds for Eastern and Southern Africa as they continue to expand around the world.

If this mission resonates with you, we'd love to help you support their work. Semilla Nueva is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means you can donate directly at semillanueva.org/donate That's S-E-M-I-L-L-A-N-U-E-V-A dot org slash donate. Or if you'd like to fund this work through your donor advice fund, you can find them in your UI Charitable Portal account or you can reach out to us at impact@uicharitable.org and we can help.

This is the final segment of the podcast, the Impact Inbox. In this segment, we feature one question from a member of our community that's emailed in.

And that question is, “What is an RCT? I've heard it mentioned a few times on the podcast and was wondering what it really means in the context of high impact philanthropy?”

Thanks for emailing that question in. RCT stands for Randomized Controlled Trial. When done well, it's one of the most rigorous ways to test whether a social impact organization is actually causing some of the changes in their clients' lives that they are seeing. RCTs are used in a lot of different cases. They're used for medical studies, healthcare, social sciences, and in social impact organizations like nonprofits.

They're often considered the gold standard for understanding the impact of a program or understanding the real changes occurring in the people's lives because of the program rather than chance or any other factor.

They provide statistically significant evidence that an organization can say, because of our work in this area, we have caused X or Y change in someone's life.

Okay, now that I've described that a little bit, how does it work? Well, let's give an example. Imagine an organization wants to know if providing microloans really helps families escape poverty. In an RCT or a randomized controlled trial, researchers would randomly divide participants into two groups. One that receives the microloans, the treatment group, and one that doesn't, the control group.

Because the groups are randomly selected, any difference in outcomes like income levels, education, or health can be attributed to the program itself rather than any outside factors that might occur.

So what does this mean for us as donors? RCTs are super valuable because they tell donors which programs have proven results and that they can donate with extremely high confidence that their contribution or impact investment is actually going to change someone's life. And specifically in what ways.

So to sum it up, an RCT or randomized controlled trial is one of the best, but not the only tool in a high impact philanthropist’s toolkit to understand if what we do is actually making a difference.

Thanks again for that question. Please send in your thoughts, questions, comments, and we'll read them out here on the podcast. You can email us at impact@uicharitable.org

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Impact Innovations Podcast.

We hope today's conversation has inspired you to approach philanthropy with more intention, effectiveness, and strategy in a way that you can confidently feel that you are truly making a difference.

Please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share this episode with people you think might be interested. All of this helps our podcast grow.

To continue the conversation or if you have any questions, get in touch with us at impact@uicharitable.org. And we'll see you next time.

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