One of the reason I love Toronto is that there are so many small programs that do great things. It seems as if every month I find another community group making the world a better place. Today I found out that in Toronto there’s a group of people who harvest all the fruit they can in the city. They pick fruit from residential trees (with permission of course) and from city trees (again, with permission) then the fruit is shared. They are called Not Far From the Tree and they are having a tree tour on Saturday which hopefully I’ll be able to attend.

The core of our programming is our residential fruit-picking program, where we pick fruit from trees that would otherwise go to waste. We help fruit tree owners make use of the abundance of fruit that their trees offer by dispatching teams of volunteers to harvest it for them. One third goes to the fruit tree owners, another third goes to the volunteers for their labour, and the final third is distributed (by bicycle or cart) to community organizations in the neighbourhood who can make good use of the fresh fruit.