Senior Gleaners help combat food insecurity

By Vince Meehan

30 years ago, a group of seniors were driving through the orchards of North County and had an epiphany. They were Laurel Gray, a retired Lutheran minister and two farmers, Dene Hatch and George Norton. They spied tons of fruit laying on the ground going unused and thought that many San Diegans could benefit from this bounty if it was collected. They decided to do just that, and on that day, the Senior Gleaners was born.

Margaret Burton is the President of Senior Gleaners, a 501c3 non-profit organization based in San Diego who gather fruit from orchards, back yards, and even stores. This fruit then is transported to food banks across the county where it is distributed to families who need it. Burton retells the story of those three original seniors who started the whole movement. “There were three gentlemen who where driving through Escondido, and saw all this fruit on the ground and they said, ‘This is terrible, we need to do something because there are hungry people out there,’ and so they started collecting this fruit!”

Senior Gleaners now has over 100 senior volunteers who gather the excess fruit on Tuesdays and Thursdays in four separate groups including North County, East County, South Bay and Clairemont. The seniors pick everything from oranges to tangerines, pomelos, grapefruit, limes, lemons, and persimmons. However, there are a couple of fruits they cannot pick due to the delicate nature of the food. “We don’t pick kumquats and loquats because they are hard to transport and they go bad fast, Burton noted. “This makes the delivery very tough so we can’t pick them.”

Senior Gleaners harvested over 215,000 lbs. of fruit last year and are on course to do just as much this year. The system is very simple: farmers or homeowners with fruit bearing trees contact Senior Gleaners and a team is sent out shortly to collect the fruit. The fruit is then sent to over 50 food banks, churches and organizations across San Diego who make sure they are given to those in need. These include: 4 Community Care, Abundant Grace Christian Church, Backyard Produce Project, Boys and Girls Club of Poway, City Heights Assemble Church, City Heights Community Fridge, Father Joe’s Village, Feeding the Flock, La Mesa Salvation Army/Kroc Center, Lakeside Christian Help Center, O’side Kitchen Collaborative, Sherman Heights Table of Justice and Hope and Shoreline Community Services. Burton says that one of the biggest helpers is the Clairemont Christian Service Agency who help feed their community. But what is a gleaner anyway, and where does that word come from?

According to Senior Gleaners, the term goes back to biblical times and refers to a worker who collected remnants from a harvest left in the field. This term has its roots based in charity as noted in the book of Leviticus.

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not be so thorough that you reap the field to its very edge, nor shall you GLEAN the stray ears of grain. Likewise, you shall not pick up the grapes that have fallen. These things you shall leave for the poor...”

-Leviticus 19:9-10

Senior Gleaners also benefits from individual donations as well as grants from the Matthew 25 fund of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, annual grants from the San Diego County Employees’ Charitable Organization, and grants from Las Patronas, a San Diego philanthropic organization formed in 1946. Along with rescuing unused fruit, the gleaners provide meaningful activity and social connections for the 55 and older volunteers, as well as keeping tons of organic material out of landfills where it generates harmful methane gas. They also help businesses comply with state laws restricting disposal of organic materials, and aid senior homeowners who cannot care for the fruit trees in their yards.

Today, the Gleaners have picked and distributed as much as 400,000 pounds of food in one year. This has meant helping feed more than 5,000 families per year. Burton sees Senior Gleaners as a calling as well as a service to the community. “When I retired, I was looking for volunteer opp ortunities because I decided to give the rest of my life to volunteer organizations. So this came up as a volunteer match which is a website that hooks up volunteers with jobs. So I signed up and that was about eight years ago. I also signed up for VITAS which is an organization that makes memory bears for patients who have recently died, and we give the bears back to the caregivers.”

Seniors like Burton and the others at Senior Gleaners are making a difference in the community as well as being a part of the solution. If you would like to volunteer your time at Senior Gleaners, or would like to offer fruit from your trees, go to: www.SeniorGleanersSDco.org