A group of Dos Pueblos High School students has given away thousands of salads through a program that provides meals to their classmates and teachers.
The student-led Healthy Salad Meals program has made more than 7,400 salads since January 2025. It has partnered with local businesses along the way, such as the Wakefield Believe Big Charitable Foundation, which donated $2,500 last week.
The lettuce for the meals is grown on the school campus, next to the cafeteria, in hydroponic towers — vertical structures that allow crops to be grown without soil and rely entirely on water filled with nutrients.
The students harvest the lettuce on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and turn it into 100 salads a week.
Program founder Jackson Simmons-Furlati said the idea for the program was born out of his work raising money for a local food bank.
“I realized that I kind of wanted to (provide) a healthier option … something that was grown locally sourced to my community,” Simmons-Furlati said.
After some research, he settled on using hydroponic towers, which use 90% less water than traditional farming.
By using the towers, the program has saved 37,000 gallons of water and avoided the use of more than 300 pounds of plastic, organizers said.
The primarily romaine lettuce is grown on a four-week cycle. Some of the lettuce is collected every week to make salads with dressings and toppings.
The lettuce is collected by Simmons-Furlati and a group of other students who help clean the produce, prep it and make salads.
Simmons-Furlati said the response from students has been largely positive.
“(The salads) all go away immediately,” he said. “I think when we first gave out the salads, they were gone in less than 10 minutes. … I was so glad about that.”
The group also has partnered with a local Italian restaurant, Ca’Dario in Goleta, to raise money for the program. The restaurant donates $10 to the program for everyone who orders the Peace Salad from the menu.
Drew Wakefield, the founder of the Believe Big Charitable Foundation and a local radio host, said he learned about the program from friends at Pilgrim Terrace Urban Farms and Kitchen.
Pilgrim Terrace Urban Farms and Kitchen has partnered with the program in the past and gifted the students a hydroponic tower through its Pilgrim Terrace Foundation.
Wakefield called the program a “win-win” for everyone. He said it teaches the students skills while also benefiting the school.
“What I love about the program is students are actually doing the work,” Wakefield said. “It’s students that have to be here each and every day, checking on the growth of the plants, making sure it’s watered, making sure it’s fertilizing, cultivating, and then they get to feed their fellow students so they can be smarter and healthier and (more) athletic.”
Wakefield said the donation to Healthy Meals is the first gift the new foundation has given out, and he hopes to see the program expand to other schools in the future.
