A long time ago I started wondering why some students came to school hungry. It was a problem that was heartbreaking and it made me realize that I had to do something...how are we going to feed students?

And so I started thinking, what if students were fed healthy food at school all the time? I began to realize that there would be benefits from students being fed...the importance of children needing to eat so that they can learn. The need to educate our students so they can apply these skills to their communities to support themselves and essentially mankind for generations to come.

And then it came to me...we can grow our own food!

What if we used available space at schools, parking lots and lands for gardens? What if mobile baskets could be built by the students?

Imagine students building their own gardens and learning to harvest, prepare, eat and compost their own food. What if schools could build gardens and grow plants, every year supplying not only themselves, but their community with food?

I’m Joshua Hebb and I am the founder of Hands On Growing.

We bring people together in a community through education and management of building edible gardens that harvest locally grown food that is not only sustainable, but regenerates the environment while strengthening the community by providing local affordable healthy food.

I believe that we need to change how we are currently doing things. The way we produce food is destroying the environment that is needed to sustain itself, and so we need to teach our communities by using new systems and technology. We need food that is healthy, sustainable, local, affordable, and improves the natural environment vs. damaging it.

Because we need and can work together, we can reconnect ourselves with our environment to sustainably grow food that supports us.

Let’s teach someone how to grow and they will be able to grow and teach others.

- Joshua Hebb President