Charitable Idea Bears Fruit, Vegetables : Volunteers Pick Crops to Assist People in Need

Judy Williams and a group of volunteers expect to turn several dozen poor and hungry people Saturday into high-yield farmers.

The plan isn’t fancy, but it is effective: Gather all the volunteers you can find--service clubs, youth groups, individuals. Ask them to bring shovels and turn them loose on a 40-acre field packed with ripe potatoes. At the end of the day, several thousand pounds of spuds will be unearthed, and the hungry will have fuller larders. Some volunteers, both low-income families and individuals, will even turn into springtime Santa Clauses in the bargain and distribute part of the yield to other hungry people in the county.

The day of potato digging is part of a program sponsored by Sunshine Outreach Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Laguna Niguel. Williams, a secretary from Mission Viejo, said she began the organization four years ago mainly to distribute food to the poor and needy through gleaning food crops.

In agricultural parlance, gleaning is the picking of crops that remain in a field after the main harvest is completed. The yield last year from 200 Sunshine Outreach volunteers gleaning one acre in six hours: 60,000 pounds of potatoes.

The pickers have come from every economic group, from members of an Orange County athletic club who “showed up in their Rolls-Royces to pick potatoes” to “one lady who goes to markets in the area and picks up old bread” to distribute to the poor and hungry, Williams said. “There are wealthy, average and needy folks out in the fields together. It’s really neat to see.”

It also offers an extra benefit--a lifting of the spirit. Many people who are hungry and poor are also depressed, she said. “They’re not feeling good about themselves. And I’ll say, ‘Hey, come on out here with a shovel. I could use some help.’ And they’ll fill a truck up full of potatoes and say to themselves, ‘Gee, I did that.’

“And later, if they come along and help distribute to other needy people, sometimes you see a real transformation. They haven’t had anything before, but now they say, ‘Wow, I actually have something to give to somebody else.’ ”

The potato field 15 miles south of San Clemente that will be visited for this weekend’s gleaning is planted with the previous year’s seed potatoes as an experimental project to help farmers determine what sort of soil, water and planting conditions will work best the following year, Williams said. As a result, the 40-acre field, run by a San Clemente farmer, is barely touched at harvest time and routinely plowed under shortly afterward.

“We can only make a slight dent in what’s out there,” she said. “We probably have only ever been able to pick one acre . . . but there are probably a million pounds out there.”

(Volunteers, who are welcome to work only an hour or the entire 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. picking, are asked to meet at the Las Pulgas Canyon Road off-ramp of Interstate 5, about 12 miles south of San Clemente. More information is available by calling (714) 831-6199.)

Sunshine Outreach, with almost 600 volunteers on its books, distributes food to nearly 40 charitable groups in Southern California, which in turn give it to needy families and individuals, Williams said. The group also collects dated food from supermarkets and distributes it to organizations such as halfway houses and churches.

In June, the organization takes volunteers to 25 acres of orange groves in Anaheim and San Juan Capistrano. The small groves, owned by residents who live in houses on the adjacent land, are picked with the owners’ permission, “and the owners get a tax write-off,” she said.

“Actually, you never know what will be available,” she said. “Sometimes we’ve picked corn in August. And all of it is really great produce.”

Sunshine Outreach’s flow of food began in 1983 when Williams, 39, heard of a gleaning program being operated in Washington state. She traveled there and learned how she could begin a similar project in Southern California.

One of the first beneficiaries of Sunshine Outreach’s programs was Beverly, 44, formerly a full-time worker for a traveling carnival. When she and several carnival workers were living together during one of the breaks from traveling in 1983, Beverly found that there were too many people in the house with too little money and too little food. She donated her time to Sunshine Outreach in return for food. She now has a full-time job and continues to volunteer frequently for the program.

Needy people are sometimes hesitant to accept food from the organization at first, she said, “but when they find there are no strings attached, they think it’s a pretty nice gift. There are some poverty families I know of in north Laguna, and I know they need the food, so a lot of times I just leave it on their doorstep. I like the feeling of helping out. It really makes me feel good to do this.”

Williams said many in need agree.

“They’ll tell me that it feels so good to earn it rather than have it given to them,” she said.