Hutton Settlement Children's Home Embraces GROW BIOINTENSIVE
The Hutton Settlement Children's Home, located in Spokane Valley, WA, provides safe and healthy living opportunities for children ages 5 to 18 in need of a long-term alternative home. The campus consists of four large homes, supported by 319 acres of pristine natural settings with opportunities for learning and recreation. We believe in providing a safe home and family, relationships of compassion and respect, and hope and wholeness through opportunity. As the Settlement celebrates its centennial in 2019, there will be a returning home for hundreds of alumni who have called Hutton home over the past decades. Many of those returning will recall the memories of wheat fields, orchards, and livestock that were central to the Hutton Settlement mission of providing long-term care for abused, abandoned and neglected children in the early years. Over the decades, with agricultural interests declining and food-producing regulations increasing, the farm disappeared from campus life.
The skills of dryland mini-farming have been foundational to our garden success. However, the true miracle of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE approach is in its expanded life-giving message that is shared with the children of the Hutton Settlement. Seasonal discussions in the garden centered around digging deeper to allow space for healing and support in our lives, relying on close-proximity diversity for healthy community, and leaving legacy seeds for the next generation. Double-digging, close companion planting, and seed collecting are valuable garden methods, but they are also ways to live a healthy human life and are certainly healing messages for children who have been forced into defended barriers, isolation, and hopelessness. I credit Ecology Action for helping to expose our children to a hopeful world of abundance and the opportunity to offer their gardens the very thing they often didn't receive—the deep nurturing, close relationship, and hope necessary to thrive. It is in this empowered action that the children of the Hutton Settlement are being transformed and healed.
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Today, as we enter a new century of long-term care for children in need, there is a resurgence of farm life at Hutton, largely led by a youth movement, to support food justice on campus and beyond. To capture and mobilize this young energy, the Hutton Settlement sent three staff and two youth to the 
