The People's
GrowHouse

Feed Hunger Now, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is "Creating Sustainable, Affordable, Locally Sourced Food." The organization is first and foremost a sustainable agriculture education hub: its primary purpose is to share knowledge of recirculating-water food growing methods, with the nutrient-dense produce grown in its gardens made available to individuals facing food insecurity as the natural result of that education.

Feed Hunger Now operates the People's Gardens at the Rescue Outreach Mission (ROM), a 115-bed homeless shelter in Sanford, Florida, using hydroponic, aeroponic, and aquaponic recirculating-water systems to grow fresh leafy greens, herbs, vegetables, and fruits year-round across two adjoining sites. Produce is shared across the shelter kitchen, the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida's downtown Orlando meal program, and other area partners and volunteers.

Individuals experiencing homelessness and food insecurity face some of the most acute barriers to fresh, nutritious food of any population. Conventional emergency food distribution is built around procurement and transport, not production — moving food from where it is grown to where it is needed, often with meaningful delay between harvest and plate.

Community-scale controlled-environment agriculture has matured to the point where a small, well-engineered facility can produce meaningful volumes of fresh produce on a compact footprint, in any climate, with modest water and energy inputs relative to conventional field agriculture. What has been missing is not the growing technology — it is a packaged, replicable, costed, and teachable unit that a shelter, school, campus, or community organization can actually deploy.

The People's GrowHouse is a small, modular controlled-environment agriculture facility — about the footprint of a tiny home — designed to bring sustainable food production and hands-on growing education to any community, in any climate. It is being designed and priced for affordability, so the communities that need it most can put one to work.

The GrowHouse business model is structured in three phases so that capital commitment, operating exposure, and community impact all scale together. Each phase is fundable on its own terms: Phase 1 as a donor- and grant-backed pilot, Phase 2 as a grant- and public-partnership-backed expansion, and Phase 3 as an operationally self-sufficient community production hub.

Pricing reflects 2025–2026 U.S. commercial supplier quotes across structural, hydroponic, aeroponic, and lighting categories.

Total electricity draw across LED lighting, misting and circulation pumps, HVAC, dehumidification, fans, and monitoring equipment totals approximately 184.6 kWh/day, for an annual electricity cost of approximately $10,332. A Phase 3 solar PV installation is projected to reduce this by 60–80%.

Yield benchmarks are derived from peer-reviewed research on hydroponic lettuce production and commercial aeroponic tower operator data. Conservative estimates are used throughout to preserve credibility with grant reviewers and institutional partners.

Feed Hunger Now's partnership network spans formal program partners, informal working relationships, and an active, diversified grant pipeline. The intent is to reduce reliance on any single funder while building a sustainable, replicable funding base for the GrowHouse.

The GrowHouse rollout follows a disciplined, sequenced roadmap from donor engagement through first harvest, designed to de-risk capital deployment and build a documented case for subsequent phases and funders.

The GrowHouse's modular structure, off-grid capability, and hurricane-resistant engineering make the unit relevant well beyond its original Central Florida context, including disaster-prone regions and communities with limited or unreliable grid infrastructure.

An honest accounting of risk is part of what makes this model fundable — grant reviewers and institutional partners respond to a plan that names its own exposure and shows the mitigation already built into the design.

Controlled-environment agriculture is moving toward more structured accountability: lot management, traceability, worker hygiene, equipment design, and systems-based risk management are now baseline expectations, not optional extras. Most traceability systems answer where a product moved. They rarely answer how it came into existence — under what conditions, with what interventions, under whose authority, and with what evidence.

As the GrowHouse network scales past Phase 3 into a multi-site, multi-operator model, that gap becomes the operating risk: more locations, more volunteers, more automation, and more distance between the person who grew the food and the person who eats it. The EVRESA AI Green Standard™ is the governance specification Feed Hunger Now intends to apply at that scale — a framework, developed with EVRESA LLC, that treats every seed, every operator action, and every AI-assisted decision as an evidence-bearing event rather than an assumption.

The EVRESA AI Green Standard™ is organized around six pillars — click each to expand.

A phased path from the funded Phase 1 pilot to a formally published governance standard — click each step to expand.