8. How to stay organised

One of the key ways to ensure the success of your gleaning hub is keeping yourself organised. Between farms, volunteers and beneficiaries, you will have a lot of information about your local area, but it can easily get a little overwhelming if you haven’t got processes in place. Luckily, Feedback has been doing this for a number of years, so here are some ideas based on what has worked for us:

Create a database of farmers

To keep all information in one place when you being your research, it’s good to create a database including all of the information about the farm including:

Once you start reaching out to farmers, include a column within your database to include contact updates. It’s useful to colour coordinate this column in terms of how likely the lead is.

Volunteer Management

When reaching out to potential volunteers, a great way to capture information is to ask them to sign up to a mailing list using something like a
Google form, that way you can ask for specific information that is needed for gleaning and store it all in a single spreadsheet.

For reference, here is our form that we have used in Feedback. The key information you want to have from your volunteers is:

Recording Gleans

For your own benefit, but also for potential funding opportunities, it’s important to keep a log of gleans achieved, including how much was saved and how many community members attended. Please also record your glean using our log so that Feedback can keep a national database of produce gleaned.