Three years later in 2010, with a little money from family and friends, Vanessa and Peterson eventually found a way to start feeding the children in his school and Feeding Futures began.

Two years in, they realised they could not continue feeding several hundred children indefinitely. Vitally, they also understood that it was more valuable and dignified for parents if they could be helped to provide for their own children.

Feeding Futures needed to find a way to make school meals self-sustaining.

As Feeding Futures became more familiar with the area of school feeding programmes, we realised that whether a programme was run by a huge NGO or a tiny charity, none had a model which was self-sustaining for communities.

With so many children going hungry at school, even in areas of Kenya where agriculture can be practised, Feeding Futures became dedicated to developing a model for sustainable school meals.

This meant looking beyond the immediate provision of food and asking a deeper question: how could school communities be equipped to provide meals for their own children long term?

One of the first steps towards this was employing an agronomist as our first member of staff, offering training to parents on how to get more from their land.

Feeding Futures has spent years testing and refining its approach, working with three communities and wanting to be absolutely sure that the model is robust, transferable and genuinely sustainable.

It took over a decade, but Feeding Futures finally had irrefutable evidence that the model works.

Through school kitchens, water-harvesting systems, food storage, school farms, agriculture training and community partnership, Feeding Futures now supports schools to feed children today while helping families build the skills and systems needed to continue those meals into the future.