Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program

The question that gets raised over and over with programs aimed at getting food into people’s bellies is how to sustain these programs in an era when grants and charitable donations are vanishing.  To keep these vital programs going, innovative strategies need to be developed, and our friends at City Fruit have come up with a good one.

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

We always talk to home owners before selling fruit from their trees, explaining that the sale of this fruit goes directly to funding the neighborhood fruit harvests next year. We aim to be as transparent as possible and so will again release an annual report early next year detailing how much we earned from fruit sales and how much it costs to organize our harvests.  More…

Related posts:

1. Help Harvest Community Fruit this Summer
2. Gleaning from the Trees: Community Harvest Update
3. Time to Rake! Updates from City Fruit

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