US Thrive for Good Foundation

By 2025, Thrive will empower 1 million people in the developing world to lead healthy and sustainable lives by training them to grow nutritious and income-generating whole foods.

Until now, a whole foods diet has seemed out of reach for the poor. That's because we've come to see food as a cost and healthy food as a luxury.

But the best conditions for growing health — and the greatest opportunity for change — are found in some of the world’s poorest regions.

With knowledge, simple tools, and starter seeds, people who can't afford to buy healthy food can grow their own Life Gardens.

Thrive trains and equips communities with hidden hunger to grow Life Gardens: organic gardens dense with highly nutritious crops and medicinal plants. With Life Gardens, they can grow health year-round — and even generate income by selling the surplus.

The Thrive model works anywhere there's 100 square feet of soil (the size of a standard living room) and six hours of daily sunlight, even with scarce rainfall (500 mm / 20 inches a year). It's based on the best organic growing methods, nutritional research and an education-first approach.

Communities who need a solution for hidden hunger work with Thrive to learn a sustainable model for growing life-giving gardens. They learn to teach others the very same methods, so this low-cost, organic solution for growing health can spread from community to community, exponentially.

Thrive puts nutritional security - not just food security - in the hands of the poor. When people have everything they need to grow healthy, disease-fighting foods, they can begin to step out of poverty.

-Kids can grow strong, achieve at school and have a better chance of reaching their fullest potential.
-Parents can beat the diseases of poverty; when they’re healthy, they can work and build better lives for their families.
-Communities can thrive together by growing gardens that create jobs, income and health for everyone — while preserving their environment.

As a response to COVID, Thrive worked tirelessly to move their in-person training online and accessible to everyone in the world. The Thrive Institute was created, the first online training platform teaching organic gardening for developing communities.

The Thrive Institute’s purpose is to empower and equip people to grow nutritious, disease-fighting foods - sustainably. The online training program makes proven, simple, training accessible to almost everyone.

The Thrive Institute online training provides teaching, additional resources, demonstration videos, support services and access to a ‘Community Knowledge Hub’ of other growers. Its model decreases the costs and limitations of traditional ‘in-person’ training.

Thrive’s Life-Garden model is easy to scale, monitor & evaluate, cost-efficient, quick results/yields, sustainable and addresses common traditional deficiencies in nutrition and health/diseases.

Poverty is complex, and there is no single solution or pathway to the problems those impoverished face. We believe that sustainable development to eradicate poverty needs to be grounded on health and nutrition, which begins with our food.
Thrive takes a holistic, long-term approach. We are not developing programs and treating symptoms. We are changing systems.
We identified that the quickest and most effective strategy to expand our reach will be done by working with partners that have demonstrated a community-centred approach, excellent financial reporting and a deep knowledge of asset-based community development (ABCD approach). Partners are the doorway to the markets and communities for our services. We will take partners through a process of discovery, planning, training, measuring and ongoing support.
We understand that every organization and area of development is different. Therefore we customize and then integrate our model and methodology to our partner’s work. This is done by training and certifying select team member to become Growing Health Champions. Throughout the partnership, we resource, support, measure the impact and continuously train the partners Champion.
Although our end-user and beneficiary is each individual community member, partners are our client, establishing a B-to-B business model.
Our business/service is to optimize the work that select NGO’s are already doing by adding a focus on ‘healthy communities. We offer a complete bundle of services (training, curriculum, content, M&E and ongoing coaching), using a market-based model that helps our organization remain financially sustainable and expand to reach more and more partners and ultimately communities every year.
To increase our impact and scale, Thrive for Good partners with other not-for-profit organizations, governmental agencies, corporations, foundations, research institutions, universities, religious institutions and giving networks.
We partner with some of the best community development charities and organizations in the world addressing poverty. Our partners are carefully selected and deliver incredible impact. We scale-up and optimize their impact with our methodology.
We know that investing in local expertise is the best way to create long-term impact.