Collier Harvest Foundation

We have two programs at Collier Harvest:

Helping Hands
We use surplus food from food drives and daily retail collections to feed our hungry neighbors.

Food Fast
We supply our partner agencies with specific foods that are needed on an immediate basis.

When we first began in 1992, we had roughly a dozen volunteers working our food recovery program serving approximately fourteen social service agencies in the Greater Naples area. Today we have scores of regular volunteers and serve 40 agencies that assist the needy citizens of Collier County. By recovering this unused food and using it to feed the needy, our volunteers have enabled local agencies to expand their services by allowing them to allocate a larger portion of their budgets to non-food services.

Our biggest event of the year occurs on the second Saturday in May during the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. On this occasion hundreds of volunteers pitch in with postal workers and corporate sponsors from around the region to deliver non-perishable food items to local relief agencies. Annually we collect on average 250,000 pounds of food during our NALC food drive!

Collier Harvest operates under both Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Service tax code of 1986 and the 1996 Good Samaritan Act, which protects our volunteers from any liability resulting from our operation. However, all transport volunteers are required to have insurance for automobiles that transport food. Due to liability issues, neither Collier Harvest nor our volunteers may deliver food directly to any individuals, for this reason we work directly with agencies and groups who have a 501(c)3 status. In addition, we require that all of our food be passed along to the needy at no charge to the individual.