Sweet Pickings Swansea

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Funded on
09 Jun 2021

Our community group wants to harvest fresh fruit (mainly apples) from trees that otherwise go unpicked in Swansea, to be collected by Fare Share Cymru and delivered to food banks and other providers.

£10,425 Raised of £8,639

102 Backers

120%

Our Delivery Report

Funded on 09 June 2021 | Delivered on 30 November 2021

£10,425

RAISED

102

BACKERS

74

DAYS TO FUND

BIGGEST PLEDGE

£4,340

From Cyngor Abertawe / Swansea Council

£10

MOST POPULAR PLEDGE AMOUNT

Coastal Housing Group

Coastal Housing Group donated £1,000

Cllr Mark Thomas donated £200

Peter Anderson donated £300

Cllr Cheryl Philpott & Cllr Mike Day donated £300

Gower Power Co-op donated £700

Cllr Gordon Walker donated £150

Cllr Andrew Stevens & Jan Curtis donated £200

Cllr David Helliwell donated £200

Project Image

Cllr Will Thomas donated £200

Cllr Linda Tyler-Lloyd donated £200

More about our impact

The environment

We've provided access to a source of nutritious food that has minimal food miles. Fruit that had cosmetic damage was donated to The Orchard Project and Cae Tan for their juicing workshops. We've also made fruit vinegars from fruit that are damaged or couldn't otherwise be used, including apple cider, apple pomace and perry pear vinegars.

Volunteering, jobs & education

By the end of 2023 we'd signed up over 50 volunteers.

Activity, health and leisure

People repeatedly told us how much they enjoyed coming out to pick apples because it was an enjoyable social occasion that gave them the opportunity to do something positive about reducing food waste by sharing surplus fruit.

http://www.sweetpickings.org

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.

Project Owner: The Environment Centre The Project Owner takes legal responsibility for receiving and spending the funds raised and ensuring the project is delivered.