Holly Hirshberg—Ending Hunger through Gardening

Not long after Holly started her gar­den, she real­ized that what her fam­ily was expe­ri­enc­ing was not an iso­lated case. “I was read­ing in the news­pa­per about the econ­omy and the trou­bles peo­ple were hav­ing,” Holly con­tin­ued. “I saw that peo­ple who hadn’t needed help before—who had pro­fes­sional degrees, who had long-standing careers—needed help now. The demand for the food bank ser­vices had gone up 80 per­cent, and the dona­tions to them had decreased 60 per­cent because peo­ple like me who used to donate to the food bank now needed their services.

“So I thought it would be a great idea to send seeds to peo­ple so they wouldn’t have to rely on food banks and could sup­port their fam­i­lies. Then they could have food secu­rity right in their own neigh­bor­hoods. When they needed some­thing they could go right to their yards, right to their con­tain­ers, right to wher­ever they were growing.”

Holly embarked on her new enter­prise with almost noth­ing. “I started beg­ging for dona­tions from peo­ple I knew, and said, ‘If you think this is a good idea, can you help me out?’ I think we began with maybe eight dol­lars in dona­tions, and I bought some seeds. We put up an ad on Craig’s List in Michigan, because I had been read­ing about how many trou­bles Michigan was hav­ing. In half an hour I got so many requests I had to take it down because I ran out of postage money. And we sent out our seeds there, and that’s how we started.”

Now, going on three years later, The Dinner Garden is a fully oper­a­tional non­profit orga­ni­za­tion with a stated mis­sion, per their web­site, “to end hunger in the United States through home and com­mu­nity gar­den­ing. We are striv­ing to cre­ate one gar­den for every six Americans.” People in need can sim­ply ask for seeds from The Dinner Garden web­site, and they will be sent free of charge.

Holly and her orga­ni­za­tion have been fea­tured on CNN, at TED, and in many other promi­nent media channels.

Holly takes this mis­sion very much to heart. Despite the tra­vails of run­ning a non­profit, her first con­sid­er­a­tion is ser­vic­ing her pub­lic. “We have a huge wait­ing list, which stays pretty con­sis­tently at 50,000 peo­ple, and we’re always in need of money,” she said. “We’re in a guest bed­room in my house—that’s where The Dinner Garden is located. We get seed dona­tions from seed com­pa­nies, and we get mon­e­tary dona­tions from other peo­ple and com­pa­nies who like us. We send out 10 to 11 vari­eties of seeds to each fam­ily; the seeds are cho­sen based on what will grow in their area, enough for year-round grow­ing, and enough to start a gar­den for a fam­ily of four.”

Costs are watched very closely, and Holly has it down now to where she can send out a seed pack­age for an entire fam­ily for $1.79, includ­ing postage.

She also helps peo­ple under­stand how to gar­den by direct­ing them to easy-to-follow web­sites for the pur­pose of learn­ing the type of gar­den­ing they will be doing.

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Despite what some have warned Holly about, she has found that the peo­ple who come to her orga­ni­za­tion for help are look­ing for a hand-up so that they and their fam­i­lies can sur­vive on their own. “Others have said to me, ‘People just want a hand­out.’ That is cer­tainly 100 per­cent not what I have seen,” she reported. “What we have seen at The Dinner Garden are peo­ple who say, ‘You know, I really want to pro­vide for my fam­ily. I don’t want to go to an offi­cial ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion. I don’t want to have to get a hand­out. I want to do it myself.’”

Holly also real­izes the health ben­e­fits of grow­ing fresh fruits and veg­eta­bles. “When you can have more fresh food, the stuff that’s bet­ter for you—better nutrients—you func­tion bet­ter. We’ve worked with one gar­dener who is a vet­eran and he’s fallen on some tough times because he’s dis­abled, and he vol­un­teers for us now. He was eat­ing all the wrong stuff and had high blood pres­sure and dia­betes. He started gar­den­ing with us and it’s under control.”

A fam­ily hav­ing a gar­den they can rely on also means that every­one eats. “Much of the time ben­e­fits come in at the begin­ning of the month,” Holly remarked. “By the end of the month the money’s start­ing to run out, so Mom and Dad stop eat­ing so that their kids can eat. We want Mom and Dad to eat too. Being hun­gry, you can’t be the best par­ent; you can’t be the best worker; you can’t be the best at any­thing. So we want every­body eat­ing. It doesn’t take any longer to gar­den than it takes to go to the gro­cery store. It’s cheaper and it’s bet­ter
for you.”

Holly is doing what she loves, and sees it as an actual solu­tion to a major prob­lem in soci­ety today. “We are a cost-effective sus­tain­able solu­tion to hunger, because we really are mov­ing to end it,” she con­cluded. “We are mov­ing to put the power in the people’s hands. We are not solv­ing hunger in the moment and then you’re going to be hun­gry again in three hours. We’re try­ing to work toward get­ting peo­ple to grow their own food so that they never have to worry about being hungry.”

To find out more about The Dinner Garden, or to make a dona­tion, visit www.dinnergarden.org.