Harvest Shelter's founder spent twenty five years involved with natural resources protection, beginning as a field hydrologist and moving up through the professional ranks in Virginia, Colorado and California. He then started a Seattle-based multi-disciplinary environmental organization which expanded geographically to include operations in the United States, Mexico and Canada. After managing that group ten years, he returned to Virginia in 1997 in order to see his parents through their twilight years and took the helm of a 50- year old publicly-traded water-related concern, managing it five years.

He created Harvest Shelter in 1998 as a private foundation from which to obtain and provide organic gardening education for his community and help those less fortunate via donations of harvests to shelters and food banks from his own gardens, while encouraging recipients of the free education to consider doing the same.