Portland Is Battling Food Waste — And Climate Change — With Fruit Trees

“For us, getting to work with all these communities — it felt like, ‘Oh, this is what we should have been doing all along,'" says one Portland Fruit Tree Project member.

A group aiming to battle food waste planted 162 fruit trees in low-income Portland neighborhoods last year — and they’re hoping their efforts are fruitful in more ways than one.

In the spring of 2023, the Portland Fruit Tree Project, funded by a $34,000 grant from the charity One Tree Planted — partnered with local organizations to find community members interested in adding fruit trees to their gardens in historically low-income neighborhoods.

Founded in 2007, the PFTP initially began as a response to food waste, connecting overwhelmed homeowners with prolific fruiting trees with neighbors and community organizations that could use the produce. The group hosted volunteer harvest parties and fruit preservation workshops and taught general fruit tree care. Today, the majority of harvests are picked and made available to local community organizations, with a portion going to harvest volunteers.

“When we take care of all of these trees, they produce better fruit,” says PFTP Executive Director Heather Keisler Fornes.

When Keisler Fornes started with the program in 2020, every homeowner PFTP worked with was white. Funders questioned who the group was serving. So PFTP broadened its focus to lower-income areas with fewer trees, where “climate change is felt more quickly and extremely.”