After 2 years of not being able to gather face-to-face, our Celebrates event last October was the most successful fundraising event City Fruit has ever had! We were so thankful and excited to be in company with all of our orchardists, tree owners, board members, volunteers, and previous staff who all make this work possible. Thanks to volunteers Miranda Smith and Carrie Zabarsky, who shot and edited photos from the evening for us, you can now view some of the fun here!
We exceeded our goal of $25,000 to help fund our Harvest Program. Our community’s generosity means that this coming summer, we will continue to steward the fruit tree canopy of Seattle and serve community needs through distributing local fruit and are now aiming to expand our harvest operations into Burien, Des Moines, Kirkland, and Bellevue!
To kick off the night we began with our cider tasting event, where 15 of our cidery partners were in attendance and serving guests locally made ciders, some with fruit harvested by us! Accompanying the tasting were performances from the very talented Garfield High School’s jazz trio, which added to our 1920’s-themed ambience. Afterwards, guests gathered upstairs for the second portion of the event where we heard from Maria Mendez-Francisco from Harvest Against Hunger and Sean McDonald from the University of Washington, as well as our own staff and board members.
Harvest Against Hunger supports our Americorps role that we host annually, as well as harvest equipment for our busy summers harvesting fruit around the city! The University of Washington’s Program of the Environment supports us through their internship program, where students intern with us for a quarter and take on special projects that also support their own Capstone research.
Another highlight of the night was our dessert dash, where we had 11 different local bakeries participate in providing delicious baked goods that were quickly swiped by guests as each of their table numbers were called. Modern Asian Baking not only donated a signature dessert, but also provided cookbooks for our silent auction!
As for this year’s Celebrates, we will be hosting the gala at the Fremont Foundry this September! If you are interested in volunteering at or sponsoring our event or if you’d like to participate as a member of our planning committee this year, please reach out to Development Manager Jordyn Egbert at [email protected].
