Collaborating Organizations

California Rare Fruit Growers have offered Common Vision guidance, training, and support on many aspects of fruit tree care. To support the new Roots to Fruits program the growers have shared their wisdom on grafting and sapling care and helped develop care programs to ensure the success of school nurseries.  > Learn about our plans together for 2008

Since 2005, Common Vision has supported Community Service Unlimited's nutritional justice mission by planting two 75 tree orchards at one middle and one elementary school in South Central Los Angeles.  In 2006, Common Vision's vegetable oil mechanics converted CSU's school bus into a veggie oil-powered mobile inner-city farmers market and trained community mechanics to keep the market on the move.

Fruit Tree Tour joined forces with the Green Ambassadors, a group comprised of 60 Los Angeles high school students dedicated to environmental leadership, to plant over 90 fruit trees in a school and neighborhood in Lawndale (in LA) in 2008.   Green Ambassadors, a project of Environmental Charter High School, is an environmental education program that empowers youth to be agents of change in their communities and world. Through service learning, community partnerships, and cross-cultural and global exchange, the program fosters personal growth and leadership skills to help youth tackle the most critical environmental issues facing our planet.

As a Million Trees LA partner, Koreatown Youth & Community Center is dedicated to planting 50,000 trees in Koreatown and surrounding communities. Common Vision will contribute to a planting in the Country Club Park neighborhood.

The mission of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council is to facilitate an inclusive consensus process to preserve, restore, and enhance the economic, social, and ecological health of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed through education, research, and planning. They have helped Common Vision to bring dynamic ecological education to schools near Compton Creek, an area where students, teachers, and community members often have not considered themselves as "part of a watershed."

The Los Angeles Unified School District Nutrition Network provides nutrition education in the public schools and has helped to reactivate the school garden movement. They have been instrumental in connecting Common Vision's Fruit Tree Tour program with schools. They provide teachers with ways to integrate schoolyard orchard into their curricula.

TreePeople has been planting trees in Los Angeles for over 25 years.  For the fifth year in a row Common Vision is gratefully participating in TreePeople's Fruit Trees to Combat Hunger program. TreePeople has offered enormous support to Common Vision not only through the donation of fruit trees, but also in helping to develop our systems to support teachers and students in caring for their trees.

Common Vision connected with the Watts Garden Club through Anna Marie Carter, the "Watts Seed Lady," in 2005 and works every year with her guidance and community relationships to planting fruit trees and inspiration where it is most needed in Watts.  In 2006, the City of Los Angeles awarded a collaborative planting of 21 trees at the Watts Towers.

Common Vision has joined Urban Farming in their Collaboration to Eradicate Hunger. Starting with schools in the Compton area, Urban farming and Common Vision are working together to develop urban gardens and orchards throughout Los Angeles.