By Stephanie Nguyen
It all started with the COVID-19 pandemic. For about three years, the economy slowed as businesses had to adapt to quarantine restrictions, and during that time, many workers didn’t have the option to work from home. According to a 2021 report by Falk et. al in the Library of Congress, the unemployment rate reached a peak of 14.8% in April of 2020, while the U.S Bureau of Statistics reports that about 16% of the U.S adult population applied and received Unemployment Benefits.
Kathy Naoum Faith, the founder of the Happy Harvesters, was a volunteer for the South County Outreach in Irvine at that time. It’s one of the many food banks throughout Orange County.
“I saw that the need was so great,” Faith said, “and there wasn’t always a lot of food.”
The inspiration came when she was driving to her home in Fountain Valley, where she said she saw trees left unharvested. “That was my inspiration to put on Facebook a community forum,” Faith said. “If you’ve got fruit trees and you can’t use the fruit, contact me. I’ll help you find a charity to donate the fruit too so others can enjoy it.”
Soon after, people were asking her to pick their trees, and Faith–who had never picked a tree before–went with a one-woman team. But she got her first volunteer later down the road.
“About two thirds of that first year, a gal in my Bible study asked to help,” Faith said. “We’d go pick their fruit and I take it down to South County Outreach.” By the end of that year, the duo picked a total of 7000 pounds of fruit.
Then the following year, a lot of the people she knew were asking to join, and users were reaching out to her via social media too. “My volunteer base grew a lot, [there was] more awareness on what we were doing,” Faith said. And as she gained more volunteers, her harvests got bigger. For that year, she estimated that the group picked about 27,000 pounds, peaking at about 67,000 in 2024. Noticing its significant growth, she opened the Garden Grove and South Cypress chapters to expand their footprint. However, the harvests were more than her food bank could handle.
“I started partnering with Food Finders in Los Alamitos, and anything over 500 pounds Food Finders will pick up for me,” Faith said. According to the Food Finders website, they are a food rescue organization picking up excess food from grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and anyone willing to donate. But she had also worked with local charities like St. Vincent de Paul, a charity based in a Catholic church in Huntington Beach, Hands of Mercy, a food bank in Santa Ana, and Robyne’s Nest, a non-profit in Huntington Beach serving homeless and at-risk youth. “I prefer when possible [to] keep it in the community in which it was picked,” Faith said.
Recently they picked 780 pounds of oranges and lemons from Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, donating them to Hands of Mercy in Santa Ana. She now has a group of about thirty volunteers who sign up for harvests whenever they’re available, with each pick averaging to about four to eight members, four to six times a week. So far, they’ve covered Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Westminster, Costa Mesa, Garden Grove, Los Alamitos, Cypress, Rossmoor and Seal Beach. “Everyone just shows up and we do our thing and work as a team,” Faith said.
To further expand their footprint and efforts, Faith hopes to open another chapter in Long Beach. “The idea is [that] what we do can be done anywhere people have residential fruit trees, right? Anyone can pick up this idea in their community and start a Happy Harvesters [group],” Faith said. “We’re just trying to coordinate with Food Finders because they’ll provide supplies when someone is a startup, so my hope is it being established this season.”
