We wanted everyone to be smiling

An Interview with one of the Original Gleaners Part Two

Could you give me a brief introduction as to who you are and how you joined The Gleaners?

Well, I'm Nancy Hepp. I came into this because Margaret Moore and A.T. Birmingham Young were both very dear friends of mine and sometime maybe in February or March of 2010 Margaret mentioned to me that she wanted to get this gleaning program going. There was all this food that was going to waste and all these hungry people on the other end - why don't we match them up? So I got roped in with the understanding that I just couldn't put in a huge amount of time, but I would do what I could. Yet all fingers were pointing at me to do the technology because I actually was running a website business at the time. So I knew how to do that, I knew databases, I said well okay, we really need to get this up and running. So that was how I got brought in and made the gleaning coordinator.

What was it like putting structure to a program like the Gleeful Gleaners? 

There was a question of how many Gleaners? How do we get them to sign up? You know, we need a kind of a rapid response because when the fruit’s ready, it's ready. We got a core group half a dozen people who were willing to be the coordinators, the point of contact, and my job was to maintain a database of volunteers, coordinators, of property owners, of the different fruits etc. and bring them all together. So when we commissioned a tree or several trees that were ready to be harvested I would quickly assemble a Word document that I would send to a coordinator, so it wasn't a big burden for them to gather a team because everything was assembled for them -- names, contact info, who has a truck, who has a ladder, and so on.

What was something you had to learn about along the way? 

How liability works. We found out that there's a Good Samaritan law that if you're trying to do something helpful for other people you can't be held accountable if somebody has an honest accident on your site, so that allowed homeowners to allow us to come onto their property without all those horrible liability concerns.

How did you keep track of all the data and information? 

It was a FileMaker Pro database on my computer. Believe it or not even just nine years ago there were no online tools readily available like what we have access to today. So I had to build it.

How long do you think it took to have is a fully functioning online database? 

I would say it was fully up and running within two months and I was probably putting in 15 to 20 hours a week on it.

As it began to grow and become successful did you have a hard time balancing other aspects of your life? Did you see other things fall because you were dedicating so much time to this?

Yes, I was having to take vacation time to do this job. There wasn't enough time in the day. But again, it was a great group of people, and we were getting beautiful fruit.

What was the transition into Good Cheer like? 

Well, when we first approached Good Cheer about doing this we were met with real hesitation, which we didn't understand. Why would they not want us to bring free food? Then we found out that they get people bringing garbage fruit that they were just having to throw out, so at every glean one person was assigned just to separate the fruit, so only the really good fruit came to good cheer. We had criteria and we asked ourselves “would I want to eat this?” And if the answer is no, we wouldn't expect other people to want to eat it either.

When you started, what did you hope the Gleeful Gleaners would become? Did you have any specific goals?

We wanted the harvesters all to be smiling, we wanted the coordinator to be smiling and we wanted the people at Good Cheer to be smiling too, and most of the time we achieved all of that.