Hayu is a founder of Mantasa, an NGO that works on creating food and nutrition sovereignty by utilization of plant biodiversity in Indonesia. Hayu has been working in the field of edible wild plants since 2002 when her thesis on mangrove for food was rejected several times by her advisors.
Since then she has been documenting hundreds of edible wild plants and their uses for food and sharing them back to local communities to reduce the number of hunger and malnutrition among women and children. Over time she realized that everything is connected and started to dig more on the connection between food, seed, traditional knowledge, soil, water, forest and women and since then her work has been integrating those issues.
