Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Vineet Kaur. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Vineet, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Thank you for this generous opportunity to talk about my two initiatives that are very close to my heart, namely, Fruitfully Yours and Project BLUE.
1) Fruitfully Yours
Instagram: @fruitfullyyoursnp
My son Mihir Anand and I came up with Fruitfully Yours in 2017. Fruitfully Yours is an award-winning community organization and social enterprise preventing food waste, fighting food insecurity, and protecting the environment. We harvest fruit that would otherwise go waste in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County and donate it to the local food banks that in turn distribute it to the food insecure. Our motto is: Don’t Let it Drop, Donate the Crop! For context, 40% of the food is wasted in the US and one in five people are food insecure in California.
Fruitfully Yours is the result of our walks in our neighborhood where we saw beautiful fruit from trees just falling to the ground and wasting. We couldn’t turn a blind eye to this wastage and decided to take matters in our own hands. We started networking within the community with local governments and community organizations to create awareness about our organization and the service we offered. We also used social media for good. Before long, word spread about us and fruit donors and volunteers started joining us in our mission.
Till date we have:
~Harvested more than 85,000 pounds of fruit
~Serviced about 250 fruit donors
~Recruited about 60 volunteers
2) Project BLUE:
YouTube: www.YouTube.com/@myprojectblu
With this second initiative, my goal is to inspire the world to live their best lives inspired by the Blue Zones. Blue Zones are these five places in the world where people live the longest and healthiest lives. My vision here is to create more Blue Zones and its citizens in our community and world.
Amongst other things, the diet of the Blue Zones is primarily plant-based and so as part of this initiative, I teach plant-rich recipes via cooking classes in the community and online via my YouTube channel by the same name.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
At the current time, there are three channels of work that I am engaged in and very proud of. One of course is my project management work in the IT area, my non-profit Fruitfully Yours that works to prevent food waste and fight food insecurity in the San Gabriel Valley community and thirdly my venture, Project BLUE, where my goal is to inspire the world to live their best and healthiest lives inspired by the Blue Zones. As part of Project BLUE, I teach plant-rich recipes via conducting cooking classes in the community and online via my YouTube channel of the same name.
All these three journeys have been a natural progression of wanting to pursue my passions, do something about issues that I feel strongly about and about wanting to make a difference I the world.
Working on these three paths, requires not being afraid to take the plunge, not being afraid of failures, hard work, consistency and not giving up. Additionally, if you choose to do what you love, then work feels fun.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
One story of our resilience is from the recent pandemic. During Covid, Fruitfully Yours did stop with its mission of harvesting fruit and donating it to the local food In fact, we adapted and intensified our efforts to continue to support our local food bank, Shepherd’s Pantry, as the demand for food had multiplied many times. Hence, we have been conducting what we call “socially distanced pandemic picks”, following all the Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines.
How did you build your audience on social media?
We built our audience on social media essentially by advertising in local Facebook groups that helped us spread the word around. Networking in the local community, attending community events, and word of mouth helped as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fruitfullyyours.org/project-blue
- Instagram: @myprojectblue
- Facebook: @myprojectblue
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@myprojectblue
Image Credits
Image Credits: Fruitfully Yours & Fruitfully Yours Living