We have an exciting new project, Urban Harvest. It’s the project that finds good use for your surplus fruit, distributing it to people and preventing it going to waste.

It began a couple of years ago, but we need your help to make it sustainable.

If you’re willing to offer support and/or invest £15 (or more) in this great project, please do go to our crowdfunding page here: http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/urban-harvest

We’re offering lots of rewards including fruit trees for your own garden, workshops on pruning and juicing, invitations to special events, plus other rewards throughout the eight weeks of crowd funding — and a special business offer to plant an orchard in your grounds.

Whether you can support financially or not you can still help. Please share the crowdfunder link as far and wide as possible so we can find the 2000 people needed.

And if you want to know more about this origins of Urban Harvest, the brilliant idea-mongers behind it all, Eleanor Hoad and Nigel Baker, see here.

In their first year, Urban Harvest were able to pick 5 tonnes of fruit, juiced it at Pershore College and sold it locally. The next year, in 2012, Northfield Ecocentre worked with them to continue the project and, despite the winter causing a poor harvest, they picked enough fruit to give to local children’s centres and local residents — healthy eating if ever there was!

This next stage is to become financially self-sustaining. For the first six months, there’s lots of co-ordination needed to find and organise volunteer fruit pickers, find where the fruit trees are, agree permission with their owners, organise fruit sales, distribution and preserving, and run courses to share skills and knowledge.

For the project to be a real success, we need a paid coordinator. In future years, the co-ordinator will be paid out of income from the previous year.