Plants-4-Hunger: Nourish People AND the Planet (2024)

Through our partners, A Well-Fed World sponsors plant-based school lunch programs in communities experiencing poverty and hunger across the globe. For some children, these lunches are their only full meal of the day, providing crucial nutrition as well as improved learning outcomes due to better focus. A co-benefit of these lunch programs is often increased attendance in schools, with more children attending regularly when their families know a meal will be served. Projects we’ve supported include schools in Ethiopia, Nepal, Uganda and Haiti.

Partner: International Fund for Africa

Partner: Malnutrition Matters

The soy microbusiness model has helped lift many women and their families out of poverty while improving nutrition and food security in their communities. Through partners working in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, we support multiple soy-based micro-enterprises. These projects provide equipment and training to women and women’s cooperatives to help them generate sustained income by processing soybeans into soymilk as well as value-added products such as tofu, yogurt, spreads, puddings, and okara meal for breads and other baked goods.

Food trees uniquely address the triple crises of global hunger, climate change, and biodiversity loss by providing food and income, carbon sequestration, and wildlife habitat. Many fruit and nut trees are drought-tolerant and thrive in even the most marginal lands where other human foods do not readily grow. Our food tree fund has supported projects including reforestation with native food trees in deforested villages of the Amazon rainforest; school food forest projects in more than 35 schools across Kenya; and food tree and food forest plantings in Haiti, Peru, El Salvador, and India.

Partner: Food Tree Planting Foundation

In 2023 we launched the Planetary Pulse Project, which facilitates distribution of free or low cost legume seeds (pulses) to farmers and growers in need. Pulses (beans, peas and lentils) are one of the most sustainable, nutritious and inexpensive sources of protein available. Experts say pulses are the best food to effectively address the double crises of climate change and global food insecurity, with far fewer resource inputs or emissions than animal-based foods, and greater drought tolerance. The UN has backed a campaign to double global bean consumption over the next five years.

An estimated two billion people worldwide suffer from micronutrient deficiency, now recognized as a form of hidden hunger. Vegetables are the major source of most micronutrients, and home and community gardens can significantly increase consumption of fresh vegetables, improving dietary diversity and nutrient intake. Through our partners, we help provide vegetable seed and growing expertise to food insecure communities around the world, with programs supporting food gardens in schools, orphanages, hospitals, refugee camps, Native American reservations, and urban farms.

Partner: Grow Where You Are

Partner: 10,000 Meals Across LA

We support a wide range of plant-based food shares around the globe. Projects include Chilis on Wheels, Food Not Bombs, and 10,000 Meals Across L.A., focused on providing warm, nutritious meals to unhoused citizens, as well as plant-based pantries and community fridges providing free fresh produce and food staples to people in need. In 2020, we partnered with Feed the Polls to distribute 10,000 plant-based meals to voters on Election Day in communities with high rates of food insecurity.

Our Disaster Relief Fund provides emergency grants to mission-aligned individuals and groups distributing plant-based food to people in need during public health crises, conflict, weather catastrophes and other disasters. Ongoing efforts include our Ukraine Relief Fund, supporting free meals for wartime citizens and refugees. Globally, we have supported emergency plant-based food relief during Covid-19, the Ebola epidemic, and in the aftermath of numerous devastating hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and floods.

Partner: Food Not Bombs