Features and Benefits

It was time for standard marketing practices, and Ben and I sat down to write up the program's "Features" and "Benefits" for the website and materials. Today was Benefits, which are as follows:

Volunteers and Donors can:

• Serve the local community in a meaningful way
• Directly impact the individual health of the needy
• Prevent waste and excess
• Support local food production
• Encourage sustainable living practices
• Increase balance in the use of our environment

Donors with excess produce on their property have less mess and droppage, cleaner landscaping, and healthier, more prolific trees (so they can call us again next year)

Volunteers can enjoy more fresh produce in their own diet, too.

Family volunteers also:

• Teach kids early to value community service, preventing waste and thrift
• Explain gardening and the plant cycle to youngsters
• Give children (even young ones!) a chance to find fulfillment in physical work
• Build family unity while lending a hand together

It's fun to be involved with so many things I care about and am interested in anyway. Whether it works just depends on if there are enough donors and volunteers, so we'll just have to wait and see if it will be just a nice brochure or a functioning program.

Logo Complete

With a goal of the new year to have the website materials done (although it won't be live yet), Christmas Break really comes in handy. All this past week I worked on the artwork and web copy for the website and found some great stock photos in my price range (super cheap). I did a mock-up of the site in Illustrator.




I know the website is available and will use Bluehost at the recommendation of my friend Janet, I need to pay the $96 for the year's hosting. I have yet to buy the pictures, which should be under $10 all together. Then signage. Hm. I need to write a grant I guess.

We're setting up the free CafePress account so folks can buy t-shirts and whatnot to support and advertise the program. Ben is working on some artwork for the kid's shirts.

Our Non-Scientific Poll

Our idea seems pretty basic and doesn't seem to need a ton of red tape to get it going. The oranges are almost ripe and we want to get started.

So we decided it was time to take our idea to the streets. Our basic idea was that we'd pick unused yard produce to give to needy families. Our basic plan was:

• We'd get donors by telling people, putting up a website, sending out a press release, and advertising in whatever low-cost, high yield way we could think of.
• To get volunteers, we'd make a policy that pickers could have 10% of whatever they picked. We'd find them in the same way as donors.
• To find places to give the fruit to, we'd check donation policies of area shelters and charities.

As I've been blessed with friends who are much more practical than my son and I am, it was with some trepidation that I told eight people about it. Based on this vast sampling of people exactly like us, we ended up with 100% favorable response and eight volunteer families once we got started! Yay!

So, I guess we're good to go. Idealism is a beautiful thing.

Suburban Harvest is Born!

In early December, my son Ben and I were having a chat about how lucky we are to live in Southern California now it is winter. Most of the country lies in snow and ice and folks are kept hostage inside with frigid weather. Meanwhile, our air cleans up, the heat dies down, the roses bloom and the citrus trees start going crazy. And don't even get me started on the avocados.

Growing up in Utah surrounded by gardens and farms, I understood that food doesn't come from grocery stores. But somehow, when I moved to LA and first saw a huge, loaded avocado tree (in the parking lot of a Blockbuster Video), I felt like I was looking at a candy tree, or a money tree--"Avocados grow on trees?" I had a similar slackjawed experience with my first glimpse of an orange tree, then a lemon tree, and the surprises continued.

Here in Pasadena it seems there is some wonderful tasty tree on every lot. And now is the time of year when oranges, lemons, limes, kumquats, tangerines are getting fat and juicy, weighing down branches. But soon will be that time of year when our daily route will take us by those same trees, now with lumpy, overripe fruit, half on the tree, half on the ground. I had witnessed with confusion the same ending to the Blockbuster's avocado crop over ten years ago.

As my son and I talked about this annual bounty-turned-tragedy, Ben brought up, with the simple clarity of an eight-year-old, that food is wasted when there are people, right here in Pasadena, who are hungry or not fed well. And maybe, we could pick that fruit off the unused trees before it goes to waste, and give it to the people that need it so they will be more healthy.

I asked if he wanted to start a volunteer program to do this, and with all his standard enthusiasm for a new project (which, for better or worse, he got from his mother), he named it "Suburban Harvest" and the planning began!