Highlights of Our Community Collaboration
“Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The NourishTank
Hunger Solution Institute
Our journey to winning the 2025 NourishTank began in 2023, when we first participated in the competition. We didn’t win that year, but we learned a lot that helped us focus on what really matters. When we entered the 2025 competition, we asked ourselves a crucial question: “Are people hungry because we can’t feed them or because we won’t feed them?” We are glad this question also resonated with the judges, and they selected our team to work with.
The Walipini Impact team is incredibly grateful and proud to have won the 2025 Nourish Tank competition, hosted by the Hunger Solutions Institute (HSI) at Utah State University (USU). This is a massive step for us in our mission to improve food security, and it gives us the chance to work even more closely with HSI to bring sustainable food solutions to USU and the community at large.
Through this partnership, we aim to build a Walipini on one of USU’s campuses in the next few years. This Walipini will provide year-round food for both the USU campus and the wider community.
The Pay What You Can Program
The "Pay What You Can" program is run every summer. We at Walipini Impact spend a long time preparing; we collecte seeds from our harvests, grow seedlings, and more. We take our seeds and seedlings to the curb of the road and leave them there with a sign saying, "Pay what you can, take what you need."
We do this to give people an opportunity to get their plant starts for cheap and provide as many opportunities as possible for people to start gardening. We believe gardening is not an innate talent you are born with, but something that takes knowledge and skill. The best way to gain experience is by doing. Too often, people want to garden but go to the store and spend $30 to prepare for a few plants, leading to a small harvest, making them think this isnt worth it to garden for themselves. By providing these starts, we hope everyone can gain experience and truly learn the craft of gardening.