Education, Food Systems,
Shelter, and a Crew.
One Million Wells was founded knowing that water brings people to the starting line — and Program 01: Water does just that. Program 02: The Community Collective brings opportunity and grows generational change. It houses Kids Without a Crew, Food Systems, Education, and Community.
Kids Without a Crew: providing kids with shelter, education, support, and a crew.
Kids Without a Crew is a center based in Uganda that provides housing, food, school, medical care, and community for kids who had none. Not a day program. Not a drop-in. A permanent crew.
It's the second branch of OMW — built on the same logic as the wells: local people, local infrastructure, sustained forever. Once a community can drink, kids can go to school. Once they go to school, they need someone to show up. The Crew is that someone.
The numbers don't hit until you can picture it.
So picture it. Uganda is roughly the size of Oregon. Kampala — the capital — is about the size of Denver. The data below is for kids who, statistically, would otherwise never finish school, never earn a stable income, never escape what they were born into. The fix is not complicated. It just has to actually happen.
One person. One post.
One call.
John Mwase saved a year to buy a phone in Kiige, Uganda. He used it to post about kids who had no one. That was the whole plan.
Across the ocean, Jerry Harmon — a quadriplegic in America who couldn't walk, couldn't fly, couldn't drill a well — saw the posts. He could pick up a phone. So he did. He called Jim Forbis, already in Uganda on a drilling trip.
Jim drove out, met the kids, and committed that day. No grant. No paperwork. No board meeting. One post. One call. A crew.
Aid runs out. Gardens don't.
Food insecurity isn't hunger for a day. It's the cognitive shape of an entire generation. A child who doesn't eat consistently doesn't learn consistently. A community that depends on aid stays dependent. So we don't do aid. We do gardens.
Why we started this: one teaching outlasts a thousand donations.
Kelly Snodgras spent three months on the ground in 2025 designing the program from scratch — planting every seed, mapping every row, training the staff and the kids. Cabbage, herbs, fruit trees, African eggplant.
Without the gardens, the kids eat when aid arrives. With the gardens, they eat because they grew it. And the kid who learned to grow it teaches a sibling, who teaches a neighbor, who teaches a daughter.
That's how a food system becomes generational. Teach once. Multiply forever.
Skills are great. Showing up is better.
Teach. Garden. Build. Coach. Read out loud. Or just be the person who sits down next to a kid and stays a while. Hugger is a real role. Every skill set has a seat at this table — and people who actually go come back changed.
One crew changes everything.
Be the Jerry for the next kid.