Meet Vineet Kaur | Entrepreneur, Humanitarian and Project Manager

Hi Vineet, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Fruitfully Yours is a social entrepreneurship that was started in Aug 2017 by my son, Mihir Anand and I, when he was fourteen years old and a freshman in high school. We would often walk in the neighborhood and see abundant fruit trees (of all kinds of citrus, apples, oranges, pomegranates, figs, permissions, etc) and the beautiful fruit just ripening and falling to the ground and rotting. No one seemed to care about it nor want to give it away to others that could enjoy it. It just made no sense. We would always talk about this sorry state of affairs and could not turn a blind eye to it. We knew about food insecurity in California and that there was a food bank in our city (Glendora) called Shepherd’s Pantry that serviced the food insecure. We thought if we could encourage the fruit tree owners to donate the unwanted fruit, we could engage our friends and other community members to help harvest it and transport it to the food bank and that is exactly what we did.

Five years later, we are a team of 40 + volunteers (core and seasonal) and have donated about 72,000 pounds of fruit from 200+ fruit donors. Our motto and also our slogan of change is, ‘Don’t let it drop, donate the crop’.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Well, Mihir is pursuing Computer Science at Stanford University and therefore his engagement with Fruitfully Yours is now limited to activities that he can do remotely. I am engaged in project management for a technology company during the week days and look forward to wearing my Fruitfully Yours hat on the weekends when the team harvests fruit for free from the community for donation. We spend about two hours each day (Saturday and Sunday), and still have plenty of time to enjoy other activities during the weekend.

What I love the most is that I can work for money during the week and do something totally selfless, with no monetary gain, yet more impactful, on the weekends. (Fruitfully Yours have picked more than 72,000 pounds of fruit and impacted more than 40,000 people in the five years of its existence). We pride ourselves in building community by bringing people together towards a cause that is very pertinent to southern California. We are also proud of the impact we continue to make, by touching the lives of thousands of people by a simple act of not letting fruit go waste. And we did not let even the pandemic stop us. In fact it makes us very happy that we continued to make a difference especially during the pandemic as food insecurity increased manifold during that time.

Getting to where we are today, has been due to the consistent effort we have put in and continue to do so. There are times when we had few donors or limited volunteers, but our goal was like Martin Luther King said, to run when we could not fly, to walk when we could not run, but to always keep going, to always keep moving forward.

Fruitfully Yours is built on what Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. If you see a problem, fix it. Seeing the fruit going to waste in the community, we did just that.

I feel that most of us do things that benefit ourselves or our friends and families. It’s an incredible high to be able to do things to benefit others, to make an impact for the larger good of people, people you don’t even know.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
The following are some of my favorite things that I would include in the itinerary :

1. Driving on Pacific coast highway at a pace where we can stop on the way and enjoy the sights and sounds of the ocean and beaches. That to me epitomizes Southern California and would definitely be on top of my list.
2. Enjoying a farm stay at one of the farms close by would also be at the top. Picking fruits/vegetable and the enjoying farm animals and activities.
3. Water activities like kayaking, paddle boarding, snorkeling, etc.
4. Enjoying the giant sequoias at Sequoia National Park
5. Exploring caves at La Jolla
6. Enjoying snow at Big Bear
7. The Garlic Festival in Gilroy
8. Visit Loma Linda which is one of the Blue Zones of the world where people live the longest and healthiest live.
9. Enjoy delicious guacamole using California avocados, and yummy ‘tunas’ or prickly pears in summer, Mexican food that I make at home and Chinese food at ‘Panda Inn’ in Pasadena.
10. LA County Fair

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The following people and tools are instrumental in our story:

1. Our amazing team: First and foremost we credit our amazing team for our success. Without them we could not have come this far . In fact Fruitfully Yours would not even be possible. Our consists of youth from the local schools (mostly high schoolers ) and adult community members. They joined forces with us because they are the cause resonated with them. They are terrific team players, pitching in wherever needed, always going above and beyond. In fact, we have never been short of volunteers, even for the larger fruit picks. We once picked fruit from a hundred, orange-tree orchard and were able to do it quite easily because of our amazing team that came in full force and even brought along their friends and family to help out. They are literally the wind beneath our wings.

2. The community at large: Our fruit donors and the community at large has played a big role in spreading word about us and our mission. This has helped us get more fruit donors and volunteers and also spread awareness about food waste in general.

3. Social media: Social media has been a boon in spreading word about us. We Fruitfully Yours is quite literally a shining example of using “Social Media For Good”. By our social media presence (especially on Facebook) and especially advertising in local community groups, we have been able to spread awareness about our organization and mission in a targeted manner in the area we service.

Website: www.fruitfullyyours.org

Instagram: @fruitfullyyoursnp

Linkedin: Fruitfully Yours

Facebook: @fruitfullyyoursnp

Image Credits
All picture are credit Fruitfully Yours team