Tour Turns Schoolyards Into Orchards
TV20 | 9 April 2008

Students at Bret Harte Elementary school in San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighborhood recently got their hands a little dirty turning sections of their schoolyard into a small scale fruit orchard.

The school was a stop on the Common Vision Fruit Tree Tour, which has been making yearly trips the length of California putting on environmental education events at elementary schools. A group of 25+ volunteers walk school groups through their own fruit tree planting and involve them in a day’s worth of environment themed activities including West African drumming, theatre and hip-hop poetry.

“We looked around and saw this obvious need, ‘one’ for localized food systems and ‘two’ to just be a spark for kids to really start to look around and see that solution focusing is possible and that it’s possible to better the communities around their schools,” said Leo Buc, a volunteer educator with the group describing the group’s mission. The Common Vision organization travels in converted buses that run on pure vegetable oil recycled from restaurants along the journey.