While growing the Produce Buyers Club program, building relationships with the food pantries is crucial. It is important to establish a relationship with the organizations. Concrete Jungle uses the following ways to build relationships: Establish Connection: The first part of building relationships is establishing connection….
While City Fruit has a Master Fruit Tree Stewards (MFTS) program to educate the community on caring for fruit trees, City Fruit also offers tree care services. The tree care specialist, offers care and maintenance of privately owned trees to ensure healthy trees that produce…
For the last five years, City Fruit has hosted an annual gala called “Celebrates.” Galas generally tend to be opportunities for non-profit organizations to raise funds for their programing, and City Fruit has added the equally important opportunity of “friend-raising.” Celebrates is an event geared…
City Fruit harvests an abundance of apples every year, and congruently owns three cider presses. These cider presses are both used for City Fruit educational purposes and as a revenue stream for the organization. Of these three cider presses, two are manual and fully operated…
Outreach and Recruitment The VISTA found success in both active and passive outreach and recruitment strategies. Active Outreach Characterized by face-to-face, phone and email contact, active outreach is effective when you know who in the community might be interested and how to get connected…
Outreach The outreach efforts for this program were heavily focused on making a community presence during the off-season months of winter and into the beginning of the growing season. Attending monthly meetings for existing community organizations and coalitions, local farmers market informational booths and having an active…
In a small community, such as Okanogan and the surrounding areas, visibility ranges from word-of-mouth, radio ads, newspaper coverage and general marketing approaches such as flyers and merchandising. A repeat visibility tactic is OCCAC’s annual “Food For All” T-shirt. This year an attempt was made…
The Okanogan County Community Action Council (OCCAC) is a community building organization which has served county residents since 1965. The agency’s gleaning project called “Food For All” started in a small-space demonstration garden and has blossomed into a three-tiered program based on nutrition education, gardening…
OCCAC started an on-site demonstration garden located at the Okanogan food bank and distribution center in 2009. Successive gardens have been planted, maintained, and harvested through 2012, with plans for continual use of this educational tool and fresh produce source for the adjacent food bank….
The East Omak School Garden has a couple of great components which can be outlined as follows: Three raised vegetable beds using compost and cinder blocks. These beds are not large enough to produce food for the school, so they are used as experiment beds…