Transform overlooked urban fruit trees into a community-powered food security solution.
Hidden Harvest is a scalable, turnkey program that activates the food already growing in communities while reducing waste, strengthening food security, and fostering hands-on climate participation.
Originally founded in Ottawa and now operated by EnviroCentre, Hidden Harvest is a proven model you can adopt and implement with confidence. The program provides the structure, tools, training, and ongoing support needed to run a safe, effective, and community-driven gleaning program in your municipality.
Why work with Hidden Harvest
Across urban neighbourhoods, fruit- and nut-bearing trees quietly produce thousands of pounds of food each year. Yet most of it goes unpicked due to simple barriers like lack of equipment, time, safety knowledge, or coordination.
Hidden Harvest helps municipalities bridge this gap by turning an underused urban resource into shared community value.
Our turnkey solution helps municipalities:
- Reduce food waste at scale
Capture fruit before it becomes organic waste and relieve pressure on local waste systems—making climate action visible and practical. - Strengthen local food security
Provide reliable, seasonal donations of fresh produce to food agencies that serve residents where they live. - Boost community engagement and climate participation
Offer residents accessible, hands-on opportunities to participate in tangible climate action—one harvest at a time. - Support stewardship of the urban forest
Encourage people to value, care for, and take pride in the edible landscapes woven through their neighbourhoods. - Build stronger neighbourhood connections
Create moments where volunteers, tree owners, and local partners meet, share food, and experience their city in a new way.
What the Hidden Harvest program includes
Hidden Harvest provides a complete, ready-to-run model designed to integrate seamlessly with your municipality’s sustainability, waste reduction, or food security strategies.
Program components include:
Community gleaning infrastructure
A tested coordination system that connects tree owners, volunteers, and food agencies through structured, seasonal harvest events.
Safety-first harvesting protocols
Clear procedures, training, and equipment guidance to support safe, inclusive, and enjoyable harvests for all ages and abilities.
Volunteer network development
Tools and training that empower local “Neighbourhood Leaders” to organize and host harvest events, building leadership capacity and local ownership.
Fair and transparent distribution model
Each harvest is shared in three equal parts—food agencies, volunteers, and tree owners—creating fairness, motivation, and shared benefit.
Program management tools
A full suite of operational supports for data collection, reporting, outreach, communications, event coordination, and stakeholder engagement.
Ongoing support from EnviroCentre
Expert guidance grounded in:
- Urban food systems
- Community engagement
- Climate solutions
- Program design and scaling
Our team works alongside yours to ensure a smooth, effective rollout—no matter the size of your community.
A proven model: Impact in Ottawa
Annual harvest of over
4.5 tonnes of food
Approx.
3.6 tonnes CO2e
averted
Over
100 gleaning events
per season
43 kg of fruit
harvested per event on average
Over
500 volunteer
opportunities
Why Hidden Harvest works
Every community already has the ingredients for a thriving gleaning program:
- Trees that quietly produce food
- Residents eager to take climate action
- Organizations striving to provide healthy food locally
What’s missing is are the connections.
Hidden Harvest supplies the coordination, training, and human-centred structure that turn scattered assets into a functioning system. With clear processes, safe practices, and a distributed leadership model, municipalities can unlock the full potential of the food growing right in their public and private spaces, transforming everyday landscapes into sources of resilience, connection, and shared abundance.
Bring Hidden Harvest to your community
Whether you’re looking to cut food waste, strengthen local resilience, or deepen community engagement, Hidden Harvest offers a turnkey solution with immediate and long-term impact.
EnviroCentre supports you at every stage—from piloting the program in a single neighbourhood to scaling city-wide and embedding gleaning into broader climate or food strategies.
Together, we can help Hidden Harvest take root in your community to grow a model of resilience, belonging, and shared value.
