When Jeff Morgan visited Chavín de Huántar last August, he didn’t go to use a trowel or analyze artifacts. He was there to check on his investment.
Morgan, MBA ’98, is founder and executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve endangered cultural sites in developing countries by supplying money for restoration and tourism development. GHF hopes to eventually contribute $100,000 to John Rick’s excavation at Chavín.
Morgan calls upon his experience in international sales and marketing—he worked at Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems as well as several high-tech start-ups—to entice investors. “I basically have the same job as before because it’s just sales and marketing,” he says. “I’m selling projects to donors, building a good board of directors, an advisory board, getting the mission straight.”
His interest in conservation was encouraged by Stanford archaeology professor Ian Hodder, who put him in touch with Rick. Morgan, who studied city planning as an undergraduate at Cornell, says his current work allows him to see “city planning of ancient cities.”
UNESCO has identified about 200 one-of-a-kind cities or ancient settlements in developing countries threatened by neglect or abuse. Conservation training is limited and money for preservation often nonexistent, says Morgan. “These sites are vastly important, not only for their archaeological value, but also for the tourism they bring. There’s a really important need for poor countries to generate jobs and income. If tourists don’t come, nobody gets a job, the sites are looted and the whole thing gets ruined.”
GHF currently supports projects in China, Russia, Vietnam, Kenya and Guatemala in addition to Chavín. “Jeff helps raise consciousness not only of donors but of investigators like myself to prioritize the conservation issues,” says Rick. “We want to discover stuff and come to flashy academic conclusions, but if the site doesn’t continue to exist, that’s all for nothing.”
--Michael Endler, '05
