The Spokane Edible Tree Project aims to map and harvest fruit from trees across Spokane County to provide food for those in need. They received a grant from the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund to expand their fruit mapping initiative. So far they have mapped over 7,500 fruit and nut trees and bushes across the county. Their goal is to collect hundreds of thousands of pounds of fruit each year to donate to food banks and distribute to hungry community members.

1. 11/20/2016 SPOTLIGHT! | Smith-Barbieri
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Minneapolis, the Twin Cities
Mobile Market.
This spring THEZONE project
will pilot Green Schoolyards.
Green Schoolyards America is a
national model that is research
based.
Evidence of June gleaning
Spokane Edible Tree Project Funded
Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund funded project!
Fruit-mapping intiative takes root in Spokane
Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund awards grant to Edible Tree Project
by Sherry Jones, July 1, 2016
Got fruit? Pat Coleman does—more, sometimes, than he knows what to do with.
Twelve hundred pounds of unpicked organic apricots on his Found Barn Farm
last year might have been left to rot. Instead, Coleman donated all that
luscious fruit to the Spokane Edible Tree Project, which in turn fed it to people
in need.
And he didn’t even have to pick the fruit: the Edible Tree Project’s volunteers
harvested it and carried it away from Coleman’s farm, on Green Bluff.
“Awesome,” he said. “It’s a wonderful organization.”
Now, the Spokane Edible Tree Project wants to do the same thing for the rest
of Spokane County.
Since its inception in 2013 by founder and board president Kate Burke, the
Edible Tree Project has worked primarily with larger growers on Green Bluff
and elsewhere. Now, with the help of a grant from the Smith-Barbieri
Progressive Fund, the project is expanding its fruit-forward ambitions. Its
team aims to chart every tree in Spokane County that bears fruit and nuts, as
well as berry bushes. That’s a lot of fruit: 7,500 trees mapped so far, and it’s only the beginning. (See the
map here.)
“Our first season, we got more than 35,000 pounds of fruit,” Burke says. “I’m confident that we can get
hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
public transit style bus will become a grocery-on-wheels that will make three stops
per week in THEZONE at high density, low-income housing complexes.
Green Schoolyards in THEZONE will create schoolyard gardens and
greenhouses to grow fresh foods for school kitchens. Staff, students, and
community members will learn about gardening as well as food prep and nutrition.
The gardens also will provide a summer employment opportunity for students via a
partnership with Project Hope.
“Providing a critical need to highly collaborative and dedicated
community partners, who are laser focused on a specific area made this a very
easy decision for the Fund,” said Sharon Smith co-founder of the Smith-Barbieri
Progressive Fund. “We are sincerely grateful to be a part of THEZONE and these
great projects.”
These projects rely on many community partners, who are providing support in
numerous ways: Spokane Community College, City of Spokane, Spokane Regional
Health District, Gonzaga University, 2nd Harvest, Project Hope, Applied Insight,
Empire Health Foundation, Catholic Charities, and Spokane Food Policy Council.
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Cherry gleaning in July
Spokane Edible Tree Board of Directors
As inspiration, she points to the Portland Edible Tree
Project in Oregon, 10 years old, that collects some
43,000 pounds of fruit each season. The Portland
organization is one of the Spokane project’s primary
partners, along with the Washington State University
Extension Service, Second Harvest, The Lands Council,
and Rotary First Harvest, contributing volunteers and
other resources to get the food where it’s needed: into
the mouths of hungry people—whose numbers appear
to be growing in Spokane County.
“The need for food is growing throughout our
community,” says Shawn Lepisi, food resource
developer at Second Harvest. “Every year, we see an
increase in need.”
In 2015, some 3,000 pounds of Edible Tree Project fruit
went to Second Harvest patrons, “produce that would
otherwise to go to waste,” Lepisi said. The food bank provided 11.5 million pounds of produce last year,
nearly half its total distribution, he said.
The project’s “highly collaborative” approach to alleviating hunger helped it win the grant. Administered by
local philanthropists Sharon Smith and Don Barbieri, the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund provides aid to
projects aiming at reducing poverty in Spokane County.
The Spokane Edible Tree Project, Smith says, helps ensure “that food insecure individuals and families have
on-going and reliable access to healthy produce.
“Hunger-related malnutrition is a serious issue, especially among the elderly and children, that may have
long-term and even permanent physical, emotional and mental effects,” she says.
As Spokane County’s hunger grows, the Spokane
Edible Tree Project hopes to satisfy it in a number of
ways, says Kendra Dean, a Harvest Against Hunger
Americorps VISTA member working full-time with the
project. Among the plans: offering classes in tree health
and pruning (for greater harvests and healthier fruit) and
in fruit preparation and preservation, a “Give a Box”
program at Green Bluff where consumers may pick fruit
to donate to the project, and a “fallen fruit” program
where volunteers glean fruit from the ground to be
processed for sale or giveaway.
Dean also envisions organizing neighborhoods to
harvest their own trees and share the fruit with one another.
“Ten, twenty years down the road, I’d love for us to bring volunteers to a tree and there’d be no fruit on it,”
Burke says. “I like the idea of taking out the middleman.”
The Spokane Edible Tree Project’s next event, a Cherry Glean, takes place July 10. For more information or
to volunteer, go to http://www.spokaneedibletreeproject.org.
Sherry Jones (www.authorsherryjones.com) is a Spokane author and freelance writer.
Critical Therapy for Spokane Children Expands
Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund funded project!
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