Our Story.
Giving Garden was a little idea that grew into a big mission at an agriculture innovation hackathon (Apps for Ag) in 2016. Our CEO, Deema Tamimi, and Head of Data, Josh Livni met their future co-founders John Knoll, Head of Web and Ops and Scott Kirkland, Head of Mobile, at the event. We formed a team to build a product that would help people share food with their neighbors and after 48 hours of non-stop work we built a working app and a pitch for what would become Giving Garden. We won that hackathon in 2016 and have been building Giving Garden ever since. We have learned a lot about food system issues over the past few years and we continue to build new features to try and address some of these through the strengthening of local food communities via technology.
Our mission.
Giving Garden is a Davis, California startup with a big, global mission to grow communities around food and food around communities.
Food insecurity, obesity, diabetes, depression, food deserts, a decline in meaningful community connections around food are all things that we believe are connected to a broken food system and a breakdown in the connection between communities and their food. We aim to bring local food and gardening into the 21st century by launching an online community platform for knowledge sharing.
Our vision.
We are focused on making it possible for people to grow, share and eat local food together by making local growing knowledge, information like farmers market or food bank locations, and produce sharing easily accessible with the data and social tools that are at our generations fingertips.
The Giving Garden platform, which is in beta on iOS, Android (and partially on the web), enables gardeners and local- food enthusiasts to share ideas, questions, events and extra homegrown produce. The apps’ grow algorithm uses location, weather and plant data to recommend plants and planting dates to gardeners.
We’ve only just scratched the surface on what a local food system platform can do and hope to explore other features to reduce food waste, fight food insecurity, and incentivize community involvement through “karma points”.
Our team.
We are a small, mission-driven team of five with many amazing interns and partners helping us grow and meet our goals. We all bring open minds, community-centered thinking and passion to our work. We have a no-jerk policy and aim to foster a creative and inclusive environment. We have many internship opportunities open if you are a student looking to get experience at a fast- paced and mission-driven startup.
Madeline Chen
Lead Designer