Concrete Jungle transforms overlooked and underutilized fruit trees and land into a healthy food source for communities in need. We started as an all volunteer run organization in 2009, creating fun, innovative ways to solve issues of food waste and food insecurity. Since then, we have grown into a 501(c)3 with one full time staff person, 3 very part time contractors, and a volunteer base of 1,200.  Each year we increase our harvest about by 50-200%. We believe we have been successful because of our very engaged and enthusiastic volunteer base.

Since our founding in 2009, we have donated 117,583 pounds of produce (470,335 servings) to hunger relief organizations in Georgia.  We do this by:

• Mapping fruit trees: 3,200 trees mapped in total
• Educating and engaging volunteers to identify and harvest fruit through Concrete Jungle-organized activities 
• Creating technology to monitor ripening of trees
• Cultivating 4,000+ pounds vegetables annually on our urban farm 
• Gleaning from farms and orchards at the end of their season
• Partnering with local food pantries and soup kitchens to make fresh, local produce more accessible
• Providing produce education to clients through taste tests, recipe demos and cooking classes 
• Hiring clients from partner agencies to help lead cooking classes and recipe demonstrations
• Providing educational programming to the Atlanta community around identifying fruit trees, growing fruits and vegetables, and preparing healthy food
• Expanding our programming to a satellite campus in Athens, GA

While we harvest 30,000+ pounds of produce each year, we collect from only 10% of the fruit trees around Atlanta and surrounding communities. We believe we can harvest much more produce if we can leverage our existing resources to build capacity. We hope to engage an Americorps member to build our capacity by:

• Formalizing processes around our fruit tree management, volunteer events, and produce distribution programs.
• Creating volunteer management strategy and leadership programming.
• Piloting satellite Concrete Jungle program.

We believe these steps could provide partner food pantries and soup kitchens around the state with an additional tens of thousands of pounds of fresh produce. 

Americorps member will participate in Concrete Jungle activities in our fruit tree management, volunteer events and produce distribution programs in order to create evaluation tools, protocol and training materials to expand our programming. Americorps member will lead volunteer management and satellite program.