Eating healthy ain’t always easy, especially when you get your groceries at the food bank.
Atlanta residents Craig Durkin and Aubrey Daniels wanted to help change that when they started Concrete Jungle in 2009, a volunteer-run urban foraging program that distributes fresh fruits and vegetables to local food banks. What started as an adventure across the city to find free apples for making cider led to uncovering a wealth of abandoned and underutilized fruit trees.
Since 2009, Durkin, Daniel and a group of volunteers have rescued over 60,000 lbs. of fresh fruit and vegetables. Now they have their own farm and created a public fruit tree map of Atlanta so that any hungry person can find a bite to eat.
For the past 5 years, Concrete Jungle also reclaimed an abandoned plot of land in Southwest Atlanta – calling it Dogwood Farm – which now grows about one ton of vegetables each year.
The fresh produce either goes straight to a food bank for distribution or is donated to an organization that cooks free meals for low-income and homeless communities. In partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology’s Public Design Workshop, they use drones to scope which trees are ripe before heading out with the volunteers. They’re now working on technology that will alert them when it senses a fruit is heavy and ripe. One volunteer, Erin Croom, told Nationswell that the reason she takes her kids out picking fruit for Concrete Jungle is to show them that “there is magic in ordinary and familiar spaces. [My kids] are so proud to gain new knowledge — like being able to identify new trees — and do something that helps others.”
