Community Fruit Orchard - Vote Online

ONLINE VOTING – Click on Communities Take Root or go to http://www.communitiestakeroot.com/Home/Index
to vote for our local food pantry CHOW to receive a fruit orchard.

Edy’s Fruit Bars brand and the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation
are sponsoring a contest for communities to receive a fruit orchard.

CHOW, our local food pantry, is one of the grant-applying contestants. Below is their description of the work they do:

Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse (Broome County Council of Churches)
Conklin, NY
CHOW, the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse, is the hunger relief and advocacy program of the Broome County Council of Churches. We provide emergency food to our 30 food pantries located in congregations throughout Broome County. We also provide recovered/rescued food to some 35 soup kitchens and community meal programs in the county. In 2009, nearly 2 million pounds of emergency food was distributed through our warehouse. Over the past few years we have focused on providing more fresh produce to our pantries and soup kitchens. As part of this focus we are starting a CHOW Farm Project to grow our own fresh produce to be distributed to the emergency food sites in Broome County. An orchard has been added to our farm project so that we can distribute fresh fruit as well as fresh vegetables to those who face hunger here in our community. In 2009 about ten acres of corn was planted for CHOW that was harvested by our volunteers and distributed to the emergency food sites. In 2010 we are planning to begin a CHOW Farm on land in the Town of Conklin that was rendered unusable for housing because of a major flood in 2006. The land has remained unused since then and we have partnered with the town of Conklin to begin using the land to grow fresh fruits and vegetables for the local food pantries and soup kitchens. The orchard we hope to win is part of that plan.

PLEASE VOTE for this project – it’s easy to do.
Go to the Communities Take Root website (click here)
and follow the dots...go to Plant, to the List by State, and then to New York – the CHOW Conklin program is the only one in NYS.

Voting began on March 15 and you can vote one time each day—and every day—until the voting ends on August 31 at 11:59 PST. They will announce 5 winners the first of each month, May 1 through Sept 1.

We are now in the top two – but we have to keep voting; numbers can change a lot in over a month.