Gardeners | SPOTLIGHT: Website Helps Gardeners Donate Veggies
The rows of tomatoes, squash, asparagus and raspberries in Lisa Braddock’s organic garden could feed a large extended family, and she’s always wanted to share that bounty with people who could use it.
Braddock figures other gardeners would, too, so she’s come up with a way to make it easy.
Her new website ( ) links backyard gardeners with area food pantries and soup kitchens so excess produce can get where it’s needed, quickly.
The website includes a directory with contact information for a dozen local agencies, a schedule for which days they’ll take donations and a list of what produce they will accept, “so people don’t have to call around and do all this fact-finding themselves,” said Braddock, facilitator for the C-U Fit Families project. It also has tips for keeping produce fresh in the process.
Braddock said she never knew where to take the fruits, herbs and vegetables that her family couldn’t eat or preserve.
“Otherwise it just turns into compost, and I’d rather make people smile than make compost,” she said.
She also felt uncomfortable bringing a few tomatoes to a soup kitchen that might be feeding 100-plus people.
Then she talked to folks at the Eastern Illinois Foodbank in Urbana and other anti-hunger agencies, who assured her there was a need for her service. Even though the food bank supplies fresh produce to food pantries and kitchens, “there’s never enough. Because it is perishable, there’s a constant need,” she said.
The food bank accepts produce directly from gardeners, but it often sits on the shelf for a day or two until it’s distributed to a pantry or soup kitchen, “and sometimes that’s a little bit too long,” said Cheryl Precious, director of development for the food bank. Braddock’s system removes the food bank as middle man, Precious said.
“Connecting home growers directly to pantries is a great way to make sure the food doesn’t spoil,” Precious said.
A national website called Ample Harvest also connects growers to food pantries in their area but relies on agencies themselves to update their information, which doesn’t always happen, Precious said. Braddock will collect that information for her site.
The Sunshine Harvest website also shows when agencies accept food and when they distribute it, so gardeners can time their donations appropriately, Precious said.
A grower with two boxes of ripe squash can look through the directory and find out which pantries are going to be giving out food in the next couple of days, she said.
Dawn Blackman, volunteer steward of the community gardens at Champaign’s
Click here to view rest of article from original site
|
|
|
