FreshMinistries
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The Desmond Tutu Programme to End Global Hunger helps communities build food systems they can operate, sustain, and grow over time.
Using solar-powered greenhouses, water-efficient production, hands-on training, refrigeration, dehydration, and local market development, the programme equips communities to produce fresh food, reduce waste, create jobs, and strengthen local economies.
This is not short-term food aid. It is long-term food capacity, built with local partners and designed to be led by the communities it serves.
Proven systems work best when they are placed in local hands. The Desmond Tutu Programme to End Global Hunger works with community partners, universities, churches, NGOs, and local leaders to build food-production systems that can be operated, sustained, and expanded by the communities they serve.
Each greenhouse combines water-efficient growing, solar power, real-time monitoring, and hands-on training. Around the greenhouse, Harvest Hubs add refrigeration, dehydration, storage, and distribution so fresh food lasts longer and creates more local value.
FreshMinistries brings the model, technical training, and ongoing support. Local partners bring leadership, land, workers, relationships, and community knowledge. Together, the goal is to build locally led food systems that feed people, train people, employ people, and grow stronger over time.
Read Archbishop Tutu's story →In 2022, bishops from across the worldwide Anglican Communion gathered at the Lambeth Conference, where global hunger was one of the urgent needs discussed. FreshMinistries brought forward a practical response: community-based greenhouse systems designed to grow food locally, train local teams, and support long-term food security.
Following that gathering, 220 bishops pledged support for greenhouse projects in their provinces, demonstrating local demand, community readiness, and church leadership, and helping funders see where investment can have immediate and lasting impact.
The invitation remains open: a locally led food-production center for communities, dioceses, and parishes ready to grow their own future.
Greenhouses going up. Trainees at the beds. Harvests headed to town. This is what the map looks like from the ground.
Hunger is rarely one bad day. A season turns dry, a road floods, the trucks stop coming. Aid helps, until it leaves. So we build what stays: food systems a community can learn in a week and run for generations.
Give to this workA model is only as good as its farms. Here is where the work stands, from Jacksonville to Mpumalanga.
Fish feed the plants, plants clean the water. The system every farm below runs on.
220 bishops pledged. Greenhouses for dioceses across the worldwide Anglican Communion.
A province, not a town, and FreshMinistries runs two farms here. The first is a 6,000 square foot greenhouse behind Acorns to Oaks Comprehensive High School in Acornhoek. A second followed in Shalati. Students learn the systems and work them.
FreshMinistries developed six Island Fresh aquaponics greenhouses on the old Bethlehem Sugar Works site and gifted them to the University of the Virgin Islands in 2025. A full-circle moment with UVI, pioneers in modern aquaponics and one of our earliest learning partners.
Farms on the rooftops and in the cellar of Jubilee Housing, homes for returning citizens.
Where it all started: a commercial aquaponics farm downtown, teaching since 2017.
A Harvest Hub is more than a greenhouse. It is a cluster of them, wired together with the power, cold storage, water, and training a whole community can lean on. Built to run off the grid, to replicate from place to place, and to hold up in the hardest climates.
What every hub bundles
The hub serves the whole community, not just the growers. Local farmers use its cold storage and dehydration, and the power, internet, and fresh water reach households nearby. Production, storage, and distribution live under one roof.
Where the work reaches
Harvest Hub countries
One-off sites
Single sites built for a specific role, whether training, production, or research. Each one anchors what grows next.
Global projects
Beyond the headline programmes, two more corners of the global work.
Where it started, a communion that signed on, and food already on the table.
“Your program is quite exciting and has such a great potential for helping to eradicate poverty. You and your colleagues already have an enviable record of making a difference.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“This model addresses every single one of the components necessary for sustainable development in an impoverished area. It is not just putting a hoe in people's hands but giving them an equity stake in the economy.”
Pamela White, Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti
“Christians follow the example of a saviour who knew vulnerability, poverty and exclusion. They are called not only to serve and love the poor as Jesus did, but also to tackle the causes of poverty wherever they're found.”
Justin Welby, former Archbishop of Canterbury
“FreshMinistries works to eliminate extreme poverty by empowering communities and individuals to realize their full potential. Through aquaponics we are putting our mission into practice around the globe.”
The Rev. Dr. Robert V. Lee III, Chairman & CEO, FreshMinistries
Your gift stocks a greenhouse, trains a grower, and puts fresh food on local tables. Give once, and the farm keeps giving. Tell us your name and we will tell you exactly where it went.
What your gift builds