My Nonprofit Reviews

I learned about this organization around 2012 from an article in the Los Angeles Times. I first volunteered at a backyard pick in 2014 and decided almost immediately that I wanted to be involved with this group. Outdoors, flexible volunteering, different places, and a cause that appealed: reduce waste and feed people.
I trained as a harvest leader later that year and I have been involved ever since.
I have gone into many people's back yards, led groups ranging from one other person to nearly a hundred, driven an ancient, rickety stake truck, loaded more boxes of fruit than I can count, and I have a growing file of recipes for using up split citrus fruit.

We have visited some people's yards every year for a decade, and we're constantly adding new properties and new volunteers. I have frequently gone back to homes to pick more fruit because we couldn't get it all the first time. Sometimes I will bring the homeowner a baked good made with their fruit, or a jar of marmalade.

We continued solo harvests throughout the pandemic, and sometimes in the summer of 2020 the homeowners came out to chat from a social distance while I collected their fruit. They were as starved for human contact as the pantries were for the produce.

My employer, MMC, sponsors a pick each year as part of our volunteer month. I lead this.

I like to calculate the number of servings we harvest during a property visit and tell the group "we got 20 boxes, so 800 pounds, so about 1600 servings of oranges. Think of that as 1600 sticky little kids." You can see the smiles as people imagine a swarm of little kids eating those oranges and getting the juice all over them.

The pantries and their clients benefit from the bounty, the volunteers benefit, the homeowners benefit, even the tree benefits because it has the fruit that's weighing it down removed and now it can grow more fruit! Win win all around.