NLMAC Fruit Tree Drive

New London Mutual Aid Collective is an independent radical aid organization that has been serving the Greater New London area for about a year and a half. Our mission can be summarized as a diverse effort to reduce the pressures of day to day life, as well as proactively doing our part to improve the quality of life for everyone in the community. During the warm months, our focus moves from survival work for those most in need to thriving for everyone. Part of that work is our agriculture program. We give away thousands of packets of seeds every year, hundreds of berry plants, crops, and produce, as well as distributing a few fruit trees for public and private use. While we have reliable sources of free seeds and draw berry plant clones from our farm, a steady supply of fruit trees is harder to establish. Everyone in our collective lives below or close to the poverty line. Fruit trees range from $25 to $50 dollars. As you can imagine, that cost gets out of range very quickly. The benefit of a fully mature fruit tree is hard to exaggerate. We harvest from several wild fruit trees in southern Rhode Island. One fully grown pear tree gave us 120lbs of pears. Imagine how the quality of life could change for the community with a hundred fruit trees all doing that without any of the maintenance of a traditional garden. We need to turn to the generosity of the community to help us reach this goal. You have helped us many times before. You have provided us with a steady stream of food and clothing for our aid events and have generously donated funds so we could provide waterproof insulated blankets to the homeless. We hope that the prospect of having fruit trees providing everyone with fresh fruit appeals to you enough to contribute to making this project possible.

What we are looking to do: We are looking to purchase, distribute, and plant fruit trees in carefully selected locations around New London as well as have some available at our aid giveaways.

What species we are hoping for: Apple, Peach, Pear, Cherry, Apricot. Hardy varieties of all of these can be purchased at the local Home Depot.

What you can do: You can donate to our campaign so we can purchase different species based on what we need. You can also purchase the trees yourself and we can pick them up from you for distribution. You can share this campaign if you like what we’ve been doing for the community.

Our goal: We hope to distribute 100 fruit trees this year. It is a VERY ambitious goal, but we have to dream big, and even if we fall short, we will have, with your help, given a great gift to the residents of New London for generations to come.

Thank you for your time and continued support.
-NLMAC