Cupertino residents pick backyard fruit for people in need

Cupertino resident Vidula Aiyer’s idea to address food waste and hunger in her community is simple — gather volunteers to pick fruit that would otherwise rot on residents’ trees and give it to people in need. All she requires is an 8-foot ladder, buckets and free access to strangers’ backyards.

Aiyer, who leads the Rotary Club of Cupertino’s fruit harvesting pilot program in collaboration with hunger and homelessness nonprofit West Valley Community Services, has harvested more than 850 pounds of fresh fruit since the idea came to life last spring. Her team of roughly 10 volunteers has picked fruit three times from residents who offer their trees to the program, including lemons, oranges and plums. The team picks fruit for a few hours once a month. The harvest goes to West Valley Community Services, where people facing food insecurity can enjoy fruit from backyard to table.

Aiyer said the program fights climate change by reducing food waste while also fighting hunger. The fruit, which comes from trees in Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and Campbell, serves up to roughly 700 households throughout the West Valley. Aiyer wants more tree donors to sign up so the program isn’t limited to harvesting about two trees per session.

“This is my ambition… There should be no food falling on the ground at all,” she told San José Spotlight. “We ought to be aware that we have a place to do something better with it.”

The fruit can also go to other meal providers if there’s too much collected for West Valley Community Services. If it’s already beginning to rot, it goes to local farms for compost rather than the landfill.

Sujatha Venkatraman, executive director of West Valley Community Services, said people who’ve never heard of the nonprofit before are now more engaged in helping their neighbors because of the pilot program. She said it’s providing fresh fruit that her clients may not otherwise be able to afford.

“I think that’s the most exciting, that it is connecting the dots that we’ve been wanting, bringing the community together,” Venkatraman told San José Spotlight. “It’s an awareness, (an) education beyond just (reducing) food waste, because there’s an action here and you’re doing something about it.”

The program means a lot to its volunteers, including Cupertino resident and Rotary Club member Chuck Harper. He grew up in poverty as the child of a single mother and had limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables. He said the food they did have was likely because of his community’s help, and he wants to give back in return.

“I’ll really never know who went out of their way for me, but I remember them and I hope that in many years, somebody who doesn’t know me remembers me,” Harper told San José Spotlight.

Gathering fruit from residents’ trees to fight food insecurity isn’t a new idea. San Jose-based nonprofit Village Harvest, established in 2001, collects about 250,000 pounds of fruit a year throughout the Bay Area.

Craig Diserens, Village Harvest executive director, said his team trained the Cupertino organizers how to form their own program. He wants the West Valley program to build its network of volunteers and tree donors so they feel like a team, making it a sustainable program.

“What we’re doing really is community food harvesting,” he told San José Spotlight. “It’s as much about building community and involving community members in service as it is about the fruit.”

The next harvest is Sunday, Aug. 24 starting around 8:30 a.m. Volunteers will pick lemons and apples from Santa Clara resident Jean Zhu’s trees.
Zhu, who inherited the trees when she moved into the neighborhood in 2008, said her family rarely uses the fruit and picks about three to five lemons a year. She said after this harvest, she would love to participate in the program again once new fruit grows.

“It makes me feel great that I can really help out the community, realizing things that I don’t need,” Zhu told San José Spotlight. “They should have it to be put into good use (for) people who really need it and appreciate it much more than I do.”

Contact Annalise Freimarck at [email protected] or follow @annalise_ellen on X.