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Tiare Gill

City Fruit

Seattle, Washington

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MISSION

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MISSION

City Fruit harvests and stewards urban fruit trees to support sustainable and equitable access to fruit.

We help fruit tree owners grow healthy fruit, provide assistance in harvesting and preserving fruit, promote the sharing of extra fruit with neighbors, and work to protect public fruit trees.

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HARVEST

2021 Fruit Breakdown
Apples	20,464
Plums	10,819
Asian Pears	2,344
Grapes	843
European Pears	807
Persimmons	650
Berries	405
Quince	301
Figs	282
Crabapples	233
Kiwis	30
Peaches	20
Cherries	17

43,700 pounds harvested so far in 2023!

516 harvests

43 community partners received fruit

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CARING FOR PUBLIC ORCHARDS

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CARING FOR PUBLIC ORCHARDS

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COMMUNITY COLLABORATIONS

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COMMUNITY COLLABORATIONS

YOUTH EDUCATION

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DISTRIBUTION & PROCESSING

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GROWTH & GOALS

Expansion from seasonal gleaning to year-round tree care and stewardship.
Fruit tree services and growth of youth and adult educational opportunities.
Future goals:

Grow the number of fruit trees in the Greater Seattle Area.
Expand the kind of processing we can do with buggy, undersized, overripe, excess fruit.

Our work today involves harvesting ~35,000 pounds of fruit annually from private and public fruit trees throughout the city. We steward and harvest from 10 public orchards and farms and from 250-500 trees on residential lands annually. True to our origin, we continue to work with neighbors to help them care for trees around their homes and to harvest their excess fruit to share with neighbors who have less access to fresh organic local fruit.
We have moved from being entirely volunteer-based to a community organization with a budget of approximately $450k and 6 full-time staff members. We engage more than 700 volunteers in this work, and in the past three years, have focused our efforts to ensure that only the best fruit gets to food banks.
The remaining fruit - fruit that is pest damaged, undersized, overripe, or otherwise not suitable for immediate consumption - has been processed into jams, jellies, and baked goods. To do this work, we have increased our community partnerships to include a culinary high school that uses our harvested fruit to teach their students how to cook as well as how to use local ingredients sustainably. We also partner with for-profit businesses like Seattle Cider and Greenwood Cider to press lower-grade apples into ciders that are then sold locally and nationally to support our work. And as part of our volunteer and education programs, we work with teams of volunteers from businesses like Salesforce and Google, to groups of youth from Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts and area elementary schools to harvest and care for trees.

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ANNUAL REVENUE

Revenue	Projected 2023
Individuals (Membership, individual donations, special events)	$70,000
Corporate Donations (Pint nights, matches, corporate team building events, sponsorships)	$58,500
Foundation Grants	$200,000
Government Grants	$70,000
Earned Revenue (Tree Care Services, fruit sales)	$80,000

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ORCHARD PLANTING:

HIGH POINT COMMONS PARK

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ORCHARD PLANTING:

McAULIFFE PARK

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ORCHARD PLANTING:

TROLL’S KNOLL P-PATCH

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ORCHARD IN PROGRESS:

HIGH POINT POND PARK

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IN CLOSING

We continue to grow and thrive because more and more people are interested in eating locally and supporting local food movements. By engaging many stakeholders, from youth and college students to adults and seniors, across government, for profit, and nonprofit organizations, and making our volunteer and education programs inclusive and meaningful, we have sustained ourselves and hope to create future generations of orchardists and supportive community members.
As an organization centered on food security and addressing food waste and the impacts of climate change, our relevance grows day by day, and more and more community members want to participate. We may not be able to stop food insecurity or the impacts of climate change, but through our collective actions, we hope to give our volunteers and stakeholders a way to feel more empowered to effect change and to create a community of like-minded individuals.

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Thank you!

Keep in touch: tiare@cityfruit.org