Residents of California are blessed with an immense wealth of fruit trees that thrive in the state’s temperate climates. This is especially true in cities like San Diego, where trees are laden with oranges, guavas, figs and apples in the summer and fall months. But what happens to all of this fruit?
Estimates suggest that in the United States, almost 47% of the fruit end up in municipal landfills. This is a sobering statistic in a country where 18 million households face food insecurity, and 80% of the population does not eat enough fresh fruit in their diets.
Ekal Tree
Since 2022, a group of students at the Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego, led by junior Ridham Govind is trying to change this norm in their community through the Ekal Tree campaign under the umbrella of Ekal Vidyalaya, an India-based non-profit that works towards the educational empowerment of rural children in India.
The organization has a thriving network of volunteers in the U.S. who help raise funds for the organization and can also start their own ‘DIY campaigns’. Govind started Ekal Tree as one such DIY campaign in April 2022 and established its club Preserve and Conserve in Rancho Bernardo High School in February 2023.
On most weekends in the summer and fall months, this group of youth volunteers pick fruit trees in residents’ backyards – with their permission, of course – and sell the fruits at a nominal price to raise money for Ekal Vidyalaya. In the rare event that any of their fruit goes unsold, the volunteers donate the produce to local food banks that further distribute them among underserved communities of their city.
“We’re trying to save fruit wastage, because some backyards have a lot of fruit and a lot of that’s wasted, and we’re also trying to raise funds for Ekal,” said Aadit Jain, one of the core volunteers.
The Impact
Govind, and Jain, along with club members Anmol Verma, Arinjay Bhosale and Pranav Manikandan documented their fruit pickings to quantify the financial and environmental impact of their initiative. Between April 2022 and April 2023, the dozen Ekal Tree volunteers conducted 37 fruit pickings, raising close to $3600 by selling the fruits they collected. Adding in funds raised through fruit picking workshops, other fundraiser events and corporate donation matching, Ekal Tree raised a total of $10,000 for Ekal Vidyalaya.
The team estimates that on an average, they conserved 47% of the fruit from the trees they picked, that would otherwise have gone to waste.
Aside from the funds raised and the reduction in food wastage, Jain believes that Ekal Tree is also trying to change citizens’ attitudes towards food wastage.
“We’ve actually learned a lot of marketing skills, because it’s a common norm that people buy fruits from grocery stores,” he said. “We have to kind of try and break that norm, which requires marketing skills and educating others about the benefits of eating fruit that’s readily available in their backyards.”
As of now, Ekal Tree is run primarily by the students who are a part of Rancho Bernardo High School’s Preserve and Conserve club. But the team hopes that students from other high schools will also join this effort to make it a city-wide campaign.
“It’s been fun because I’ve understood how nonprofits work, and how motivated we are for a goal, with no personal benefits as such attached to it,” Jain said. “It’s more about working for society, and that has been a new experience for me!”
