Redistributor of Food for Tucson's Needy Earns National Honor

A Tucson woman has won a national award for her work redistributing surplus food from local gardens and farms to needy families.

Barbara Eiswerth, the founder of Iskashitaa Refugee Harvesting Network, was named one of three winners in the National Cooperative Grocers Association's first Cooperate for Community contest. Eiswerth won $2,500, which will help expand the organization's outreach program and mapping technology.

It's not the first award Eiswerth, 44, has won. She was honored earlier this year by the Gardener's Supply Co. with the National Gardener Crusader Award, which recognized her in the Feeding the Hungry category.

``They've been piling in lately,'' said Eiswerth of the honors.

The path to this year's awards started in 2002, when Eiswerth, an environmental scientist, formed a program for teens in Tucson's Jefferson Park Neighborhood that would help them - through the study of mapmaking and geography - identify skills they could use later in careers.

That led to what Eiswerth called ``fruit mapping,'' which identified fruit orchards and vegetable gardens in Tucson that were wasting food. Through the Internet, farmers markets, newsletters and interviews with residents, Eiswerth said she has amassed a huge database.

Through her teen program, Eiswerth began harvesting fruit, focusing on elderly residents who were not able to finish picking all the fruit on their trees.

``Instead of it going into a landfill, we harvest and redistribute it to a family that can use these organically grown fruits and vegetables,'' she said.

After Eiswerth had been redistributing food to refugee families for a few months, a friend suggested recruiting refugees to help with the harvesting, using the agricultural skills they'd learned in their homelands.

Four years later, Iskashitaa- a Somali term meaning ``working cooperatively together''- has nearly 75 volunteers in its Tucson Youth Mapping and Gleaning Project and Local Fruit Harvesting Project.

The programs yearly collect 30,000 pounds of food that is delivered to refugee families or to local food banks that can help distribute it to other needy families. Some families pick up food from trucks at Eiswerth's Midtown home.

``It's a way to help your own family or the Community Food Bank,'' Eiswerth said of her volunteers. ``They're not looking for a handout, but helping their families help themselves after being in a war and 15 years in a refugee camp.''

Mukhtar Omar, 19, has volunteered at Iskashitaa since 2005, when Eiswerth recruited him to help with the harvesting program. Along the way, Omar said, Eiswerth's program enhanced his knowledge of English, taught him how to work a computer and gave him driving lessons. He goes with Eiswerth on many of the harvesting trips, which included leftover pumpkins last week at Brian and Andy's Pumpkin Patch in Vail and a trip to San Manuel for 1,000 pounds of olives.

``I love to help people because I know a lot of people need it,'' said Omar, who came to the United States in 2004 from Somalia.

Cameron Taylor, manager of one of the Brian and Andy's Pumpkin Patch lots in Vail, said Eiswerth gathers about 2,000 pounds of pumpkins from them each year. Before Eiswerth began gleaning the pumpkins two years ago, the surplus went primarily to feed animals at the Reid Park Zoo and local farms.

``Once we got in touch with Barbara, we decided that was a much better way to deal with our extra supply,'' Taylor said.

Iskashitaa also reaches out to Tucson, teaching citizens the advantages of consuming locally grown food instead of relying on fruits and vegetables in grocery stores.

One way Iskashitaa educates the community is through its Fun With Refugees program, which sends teens to farmers markets. where they help increase awareness that Tucson has an abundance of organic food.

``Instead of food traveling 1,200 miles to the grocery store, we can use what we have here,'' Eiswerth said. ``Some of the oranges and tangerines that we harvest from people's yards are better than you'll find in the supermarket.''