Dedication of the Isaac Newton Academy
Most people would rather feed themselves and their families than depend on handouts from someone else. To this end, Children’s Hunger Relief Fund supports numerous community agriculture projects, supplying seeds, tools and training to help families become more self-sufficient. The ultimate goal is to help them move beyond subsistence to surplus.
Children’s Hunger Relief Fund has been active in sponsoring food gardens at both the family and community level. We have also helped to develop innovative cash crop projects that can provide both food to eat and surplus for cash sale.
Food Gardens
The gardens provide a range of fresh fruit and vegetables, including carrots, spinach, beetroot, tomatoes, and cabbage.
Children’s Hunger Relief Fund has sponsored some 420 individual food gardens in Africa and Central America, each designed to support a family of eight. That’s around 3,360 people. We have also established several community gardens designed to support approximately 40 families per plot.
The gardens have been a wonderful success. Not only have many families been able to sell their surplus for profit, but there has also been a “rich harvest” in the lives of the participants. Many have discovered the empowering joy of helping others as they share food, seed and know-how.
Cash Crop Projects
Beans are a major staple in Central America and were a natural target for our first cash crop project in Nicaragua. The venture has been a huge success. The "Bean Project" supplied families with beans for planting, as well as the necessary tools and technical assistance for cultivation. The harvest from the first crop was used for replanting and for food, and a small portion was returned to the project as payment for the original seed beans. We then provided those beans to another family that needed help, and so on. You could call it a “Revolving Bean Fund”.
Bean jokes aside, Nueva Guinea (where we started this project over five years ago) now produces one third of the beans in the region and hundreds of families now have a means of productive livelihood. That’s a lot of beans – and a really good return on our original investment.
The Bean Project is now self-funding. We have started a “Banana Project” based on the same successful principles. Bananas are another key food staple and valuable cash crop.
