11:45am-12:30pm

Facilitator Amanda Bruemmer

• Technology side of best practices

• Manual side
  • Village Harvest
• How do we get people involved more than once or twice
  • UC Davis Service club
  • 1st Saturday Farmers Market
  • Local newspapers
• We have 600 volunteers but 6-7 managers. That is the limiting factor. People willing to take on more responsibilities
  • We leave ⅔ produce
• Volunteer Development
  • Identify those with enthusiasm and capacity
  • Party, identify/define Harvest Leader
    • Would you like to do it for 3 months specific term/time commitment?
  • Well-run, organized. Under 90-min. our volunteers love it.
  • Others like to talk with homeowner
  • In our practice, only one person can be ambassador/rogue
  • We’ve got roles for everyone- on ground, in tree, getting water.
  • Scrumptious Soquel – provide breakfast, very popular
  • Social component is huge. Important for volunteers to see produce redistributed, but no one else interested in conference.
  • You have to respect why people are engaged/interested.
  • Workers/doers, others want leadership
  • Get a steering committee. Don’t do it all yourself.
  • Some steering committee members mean well but don’t follow through
  • Define Harvest Leaders. Have a timeframe of how to get them independent. Have structure.
  • Job description for volunteers.
    • Driver, harvester, harvest leader > descriptions
    • “How To” manuals – sometimes too much, gotta be fun.
    • Food Forward has great description
    • ½ day training for harvest seasons, 50 come to training, 20 active.
• Harvest Sacramento
  • How to set tone for volunteers
    • Look to ways to be useful
    • We try to have co-leaders: camp counselor up front and other focusing on logistics
  • We schedule our harvest as community events
    • 30 harvests scheduled at same time.
    • Neighborhood leaders. They can take ownership of gleaning in their neighborhoods.
    • Re-develop local capacity
• Homeowners do get tax receipts after glean event from Stanford Law Center.
• Our food bank gives $1/lb receipt
• I’m interested in having the people who eat the food participate in gleaning
• Our model is internet based. For us, people who glean get to keep up to half of food collected
• We give culls to participants, but haven’t done a good job doing outreach.
• We didn’t want to make it a quid-pro-quo that we’re giving and they have to give back
• We’ve recruited people from food bank warehouse
• Sunnyvale gleans in morning because distribute same day
• Salem Harvest- glean weekend and during week. No difference in participation (income level).
• Weekends- we get college students corporate volunteers – team building targets on weekdays. But something that comes up is lead time for harvests.
• We engage high school students on weekends. They like it. We are working with student leaders and making it service learning.
• Corporate sponsors with grants – PG&E, Target, Walmart, SAP, Kohl’s
• Important to create the structure, set gleanings ahead of time even if don’t have produce.
• Davis- we have 3 harvest planners, but they overlap with harvesters.
• Other harvests orgs have different models
• We have database that coordinate/connect glean opportunities
• We have IT specialists that create calendar drawing upon years past – where we harvested, equipment needed, what expected.
• Call homeowners, confirm. Send email to volunteer database. Sometimes, have central meeting location. Depending on volunteers response, may add other gleaning. Send email out 4-6 days in advance.
• If there isn’t enough volunteers, homeowners have to be on-call.
• Because we give away produce, we always have wait list
• We do more farmers market and farms but we have signs to give to homeowners “We donated our veggies to___”
• Banners, car magnets. Do you mind if we leave it for a week?
• Farm 2 types
  • Farmer calls in
  • scheduled gleans: works better for volunteers
    • Call early mid-week and farm can schedule ahead – smaller organic farms, sometimes in the field or B grade
• We use EventBrite- can get number of volunteers- youth and adults.