For the past two years, as part of our Nutrition Initiative, Bread for the City has been working to bring more nutritious food into our food pantry for the sake of our clients’ health. Unfortunately, our Nutrition Initiative started right around the time of the recession — bad timing for an effort to purchase foods that are often more costly. But we didn’t want to let financial pressure stop our progress towards a healthier menu — so we crafted an experimental new program that would bring tons of fresh produce each week into our pantry. All for free.
We called the program Glean for the City, and it has been a great success. Altogether, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, we’ve brought in roughly 35,000 pounds of fresh produce. This is food that would otherwise have gone to waste in the fields of farms or in the wake of farmers’ markets.
It was Glean for the City that brought all kinds of fruits and vegetables to the volunteer cooks for the DC Food For All’s Great Harvest. It wasn’t the smoothest of gleaning sessions: we faced a forecast of serious rain, and had to scrap our original plans to travel out to Parker Farms to glean broccoli. But within 24 hours we had made new arrangements to glean from local markets and the Common Good City Farm. That kind of flexibility indicates to me that our young network is already robust.
Of course, this kind of operation doesn’t happen easily. Farmers are very happy to participate as long as it doesn’t interrupt their schedules, which are already as tightly coordinated as possible. As a result, it takes a lot of coordination to ensure that volunteers get where they need to be at the time that the farmers need them there, and that they have the tools they’ll need to get the job done. 
Here at Bread for the City — which is a fairly large-scale local operation — we’ve been able to muster the necessary resources to make this happen. But even my nearly full-time capacity is only made possible by a program like HealthCorps. In the future, we’ll need capital to make sure that this great program can continue. (See this great recent New York Times article for a vision of a large-scale, coordinated gleaning network in California. I believe we could build something like that here in DC.)
As it happens, we now have an opportunity to get that funding that could help us expand this program. Glean for the City is in third place in the Tom’s of Maine 50 States for Good contest. The top five programs will win $20,000 – funding that will help us run Glean for the City for years to come (and even expand it). You can help us win this contest with just a few clicks (honest!). Vote here each day until the end of the month. (Tip: Type Ctrl-F and ‘bread’ to directly find our entry.)
Thanks to all the volunteers, farmers and market managers who’ve made Glean for the City such a success so far. There’s enough food out there for all of us – we just have to work together to bring it in.
Hello, I just heard about this service on NPR. It was noted that you don’t have enough volunteers to harvest all the produce. Right after the story on your service was a story about DC homelss shelters. Might you be able to coordinate with the shelters to bring able bodied homeless people to volunteer and harvest produce? Seems it would be a win-win.