Your City Can Be A Forage City!

Youth Radio Presents: Forage City

At first, it was just an idea. We wanted to make an app that invited users to share backyard fruit with neighbors and non-profits. Then we realized there are lots of other food “bounties” out there—healthy, free produce that is going to waste everyday. The fruits and vegetables that don’t sell at a farmer’s market. Food trucks’ leftover baguettes. The beets or cabbages that come in Community Supported Agriculture boxes and don’t get eaten. We wanted to create an app that delivered all that goodness to people who could use it, which is how we came up with our tagline: Uniting the Citizens of Leftover Nation.

After releasing Forage City Beta at the Code for Oakland hackathon in the summer of 2013, we had an aha moment, which led us to launch this site. Rather than just publish an app, Forage City, we decided to release a pluckable platform. That’s what this is: everything you need to create your own Forage City, in your own community. Forage City is all about making healthy food accessible. We’d done everything in our power to make the app itself accessible. Now, we want to share our learning process, too, plus all our digital assets, the friends and resources we’ve picked up along the way, our thoughts on how the app could get even better, and of course, our code.

We’d love to learn what you do with Forage City! Will you share your stories with us by emailing applab@youthradio.org or commenting below? Thank you!