Project Pando’s Community Orchard Program
Project Pando connects people with trees to help heal the planet.
Project Pando connects people with trees to help heal the planet.
Project Pando Community Seed Collection
Help Project Pando collect native tree and shrub seeds!
Our first program, Project Pando: Community Driven Nursery engages volunteers to collect seeds from many native trees and shrubs, raise them into saplings, and give them away for free. We spent four years developing a blueprint so other communities can join this work, which we have shared for free in our book, From Wasteland to Wonder—Easy Ways to Help Heal Earth in the Sub/Urban Landscape. This program continues to operate and expand.
Our second program aims to connect people to trees via community orchards. Our goal is to plant 250 orchards across Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and all the other many cities that make up the Triangle. Over the long run, we hope to open a processing center where members of the community can process fruit and nuts into jams, oils, flour, and other usable food products. We hope that between the orchards, volunteers, and processing center we can help provide food resilience for the Triangle in the face of future food shortages, which were prevalent during COVID. We also hope to be able to provide nutritious food for those who are unable to afford it.
The Giving Grove
Little Orchardes. Big Impact.
Much like our first program, our plan is to share everything we learn so that you and others can join this work if you would like to do so. As always, our work is primarily funded by Leaf & Limb, though for this project we have received additional and generous funding from The Giving Grove.
If you'd like to support this work, please consider donating!
Are you interested in helping with this work? There are ways you can get involved.
- Host an Orchard: Want to host an orchard? If yes, we require dedicated volunteers who can help us install the trees, care for them, and ultimately help take ownership over the space. We partner with community gardens, parks, churches, schools, and other public spaces to host these orchards. Orchards can vary in size based on the available space and needs of the group. We typically also require a Piedmont Prairie be planted and maintained with each orchard to help with pest control. We help procure plants, help with installation, training on a variety of topics such building healthy soil, basic ecology, and how to properly prune. If you have a site that could host an orchard, please fill out this form.
- Donate: Perhaps hosting an orchard is more than you can commit to right now. You can also help by donating money. Donate here to support this program!
- Volunteer: Finally, we need volunteer help. If you want to sign up to volunteer, please fill out this form.
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More about The Giving Grove
The Giving Grove’s mission is to provide healthy calories, strengthen community, and improve the urban environment through a nationwide network of sustainable little orchards.
The Giving Grove began in 2013 as a grassroots effort to make free, fresh fruits, nuts, and berries available to Kansas City neighborhoods with high rates of food insecurity. The program was launched with the understanding that an orchard must be community-led and community-driven.
Within a few years, The Giving Grove helped install more than 100 orchards in neighborhoods throughout Kansas City that have faced decades of environmental and health inequities, creating beautiful community spaces that each produce hundreds of pounds of free, fresh produce for the neighborhood. After finding success with The Giving Grove program in Kansas City, its founders began expanding the program across the nation in 2019. Today, hundreds of these little orchards, cared for by a dedicated network of volunteer orchard stewards, thrive in cities across the U.S., with new orchards taking root each year.