You know an idea's time has finally come when different people, in different places, all start to think about it, and act on it, at the same time. Community initiatives to share otherwise wasted fruit have started appearing everywhere e.g. Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Zealand, Barcelona, London, York, Kingston and Birmingham. And what's happening elsewhere is happening in Swansea. At the end of 2020, one of us posted the idea on local social media and others joined in because they'd been thinking, quite separately, about the need for exactly the same thing.
We began small, doing outreach through a local Next Door group. People responded, offering their own trees to be picked, donating future harvests, pointing out the locations of unpicked trees and volunteering to pick.
We then upped our outreach to different Swansea FaceBookpages and put together one of our own: Cyfoeth Y Coed Abertawe / Sweet Pickings Swansea. We also made a webpage and had articles about us published in the newsletters of various faith groups. Now we're now a much bigger group and growing. Our Facebook page has almost 130 members and we've logged over 70 unpicked tree locations all over Swansea, some with multiple trees.
We've partnered with local groups, including the Swansea Environment Centre, the Swansea branch of the Orchard Project and Fair Share. We're doing fundraising with the Environment Centre who will keep all our equipment in their tool library so it can be used by the public when we're not using it. The Orchard Project has run marvellous apple/pear tree pruning workshops for us online and will hopefullly be collaborating with us on a juicing day. Fair Share meanwhile has agreed to collect and distribute the fruit we pick.
We recently received a grant from Our Neighbourhood Approach to pay for six picking poles, a ladder, and lots of leaflets. This is a wonderful start and a real vote of confidence. But we have other costs to meet to make sure our project happens this summer e.g. equipment, insurance, publicity materials, transportation and administration. The project has grown so much that now it needs a project manager to oversee its development and smooth running from June through November. Many grants don't cover staffing costs that's why we're trying to pay for it here with a crowdfunder.
Can you help? Any amount is greatly appreciated as we continue to make this dream into a reality!
Thank you.
