Harvest VISTA Lynsey Horne is wrapping up two years of service with Slow Food SW WA & Urban Abundance in Vancouver, WA in February. As her term comes to a close, she’s been reflecting on what the organization has accomplished and how it changed over the course of the past two years to accommodate the community’s shifting needs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Urban Abundance is a Vancouver, WA-based program focused on increasing equitable access to healthy food through the engagement of neighbors in creating, maintaining, and harvesting edible landscapes that are accessible to all. Over the past year and ten months, they’ve engaged several hundred volunteers who collectively harvested around 15,000 lbs of fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste from 5 community orchards and dozens of backyards each fall. They’ve taught community members how to prune, harvest, and control pests in their backyard orchards, how to preserve pollinators and build compost piles in their backyards, the basics of home food preservation, and more topics related to overall food sovereignty. In all, the program has provided over $50,000 in community value with operating costs of around $12,000 over the past two years.