Growing Success: Hutton House & The PATCH
Meet Hutton House and the PATCH! Hutton House is a non-profit that supports adults with disabilities through programming that develops valuable skills, and they’re one of the Old East Village BIA’s Associate Partners! Hutton House began life in 1952 as the Association for Handicapped Adults, and over the past 70 years has been providing a safe and comfortable environment where people can learn and achieve whatever goal they set their mind to. The PATCH was started as a subset of Hutton House through a collaboration with the Nathan T. Deslippe Memorial Fund and Kensington Village Association, focusing on food insecurity in London through urban farming at sites like the one right here in Old East Village, called Nathan’s Urban Farm.
“What we found, especially through the pandemic, was that people engaging in Hutton house's services, food insecurity is one of the barriers that they were dealing with,” says Doruntina Uka, a Business Development Specialist at the PATCH. “And Joe Gansevles, one of the founders of the PATCH, through his own personal experience, gaining skills on a farm growing up, he saw the value of the work, and the way that it could impact people, both individually and collectively.”