Posted by Communications staff on 7/1/2021
While Spokane tries to keep cool during the hottest week of the year, Lewis and Clark High School senior Ali Groza just can’t wait to be outside.
“Spokane is a great place to be raised when it comes to the outdoors,” said Ali, “and my family has always been really into camping, biking, skiing, all of that.”
It was her family’s love of the outdoors that spawned Ali’s love for the environment and her passion to help protect it. So, in the winter of 2020, in the middle of her sophomore year, Ali set about reviving LC’s Environmental Club. Over the next couple months, things with the club seemed to be going well.
“LC is a big school, and we were able to recruit a lot of people,” Ali said. “We focused on being volunteer-based since that’s how students liked to engage the most, where they feel like they’re making a difference.”
Once the pandemic took hold in March 2020 and forced people to stay home, Ali and the other leaders from LC’s Environmental Club looked for ways to keep club members engaged.
“In normal times, we would meet about once a week at LC, but due to COVID, we organized a lot of volunteering events and online meetings,” explained Ali, “We just wanted to do something.”
Then came the idea to reach out to local farms and growers by picking the extra produce left on their trees, bushes, and fields, and distributing them to Spokane families. It was the perfect marriage of minimizing food waste and helping local businesses.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we kept hearing how we should support local businesses,” Ali said, “and a lot of us had volunteered with Second Harvest and saw how they try to combat food waste by dispersing overstock produce. We saw this as a way where we could help contribute.”
So last summer, Ali and the LC Environmental Club partnered with three Green Bluff growers – Hidden Acres Orchards, Priddy Good Fruit, and Found Barn Farms – on an interesting new venture call the Green Bluff Harvest Program.
Here’s how the Green Bluff Harvest Program works:
At the beginning of the week, the growers would tell the Environmental Club which produce was available and how much. Then, the club would send out a Google Form where families could see what options were available and fill out how much they wanted. After giving families four or five days to respond, a group of club volunteers would head up to Green Bluff and spend a couple hours picking the produce and organizing it. Once they got an official count from the growers, the volunteers would bring their haul back to a central location – like Hart Field – so families could pick up and pay for their produce at a big discount.
“It encouraged people to buy their produce from us because they were getting that discounted price, like 99 cents for a pound of apples grown a few miles away,” said Ali.
The club also set up a pound-for-pound matching donation system with its farming partners. For example, if families order and purchase 70 pounds of produce from a farm, the students will pick an additional 70 pounds of produce and donate it directory to a local food back.
Last summer’s Harvest Program worked so well for everyone involved, Ali and the Environmental Club are bringing it back this summer, starting the second week of July. Their goal this year is to attract more people to buy produce through the Green Bluff Harvest Program to give more families access to fresh, affordable food and lend more support to local growers.
If you’d like to purchase produce through LC’s Green Bluff Harvest Program, fill out this sign-up form or email the club at yes350info@gmail.com.
Ali said if the program is able to get more consumers, they’ll need more volunteers as well: “Right now we have a solid 10 people that are reoccurring volunteers, but we’d love to have more.
“People want to feel like they’re making a difference, especially when it comes to the environment and climate change,” said Ali. “Climate change is an immensely overwhelming subject and can make someone think, ‘What could I possibly do to help change things?’ This is very cliché, but the change has to start somewhere.”
The students at LC are already teaming up with their counterparts at North Central and Ferris but are hoping more Spokane high school students join in as well. If you’re interested in helping with the Green Bluff Harvest Program this summer, fill out this volunteer form or email yes350info@gmail.com.
