Executive Director Seve Ghose talks Fruit Trees

“Yerba Buena Gardens is in the heart of downtown San Francisco covering 87 acres of space with only around 6 acres of green space and the rest a mixture of hardscapes.
The community of 12,000 or so residents is a marginalized community with an average age of over 55, 30% living in poverty, and 78% of their kids or grand kids in the Free and Reduced Lunch Program.

To offer a program that would be long lasting, not a one-off, and one around which people tend to gather and often take pride in, and also one that brings smiles to their time-worn faces is food.

In this case specifically, working with The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation and its CEO Cem Akin, from Pittsburgh, PA– we planted twenty fruit trees in large urns, and in the ‘ground’ in our southernmost block. The trees include orange (3), lime(3), lemon(4), pomegranate (3), persimmon (2), plum(2), fig(2), and loquat(1). We of course had help from our landscape contractor and staff in pulling this off on Monday, 11 November 2024.

My personal goal is to through principles of equity create a sense of belonging for our older adults (mainly) whose first language is not English, yet they live in our neighborhood, interact with us daily, enjoy the amenities on offer and this one small token of outreach and engagement will hopefully help break down real and perceived barriers, and help us all build community.

In my conversations the last couple of days through sign language and broken English is something to go by, then I feel we have done our job. The smiles on their faces was priceless, and especially after them asking and then me sharing and showing them that they can take the fruit home to eat and enjoy, was even more heart warming.
If you travel to downtown San Francisco in the coming months stop by Yerba Buena Gardens and see the work we are doing to build equity, reduce the ill-effects of the Heat Island, offer shade, offer food, tickle the sense with smells of fruit possibly missed but not forgotten, and overall create community through improved aesthetics, pride, and hopefully with the heightened levels of interest in what we are doing, create additional stewards for generations to come.
A week fulfilled!”