Neighborhood Fruit helps people find and share fruit locally, both backyard bounty and abundance on public lands - 10,000 trees nationwide and counting!
Neighborhood Fruit was created to make use of the abundant fruit growing in our urban environments. Currently, the bulk of fruit grown in backyards and in our cities goes to waste, while the fruit we consume is grown in water-intensive orchards far from our homes. We envision a different future, where the bulk of backyard fruit is utilized and shared between neighbors and our diets replete with home-made goodies. Join us in creating a future where the food we eat is truly fresh, seasonal and local!
Meet our Team!
Founders
Kaytea Petro Marketing and Business Development
Kaytea is a native of San Francisco and planted her first Victory Garden while in college (the rabbits won) at UC Santa Cruz. Passionate about social equity and communication, she has spent her career working in and around the fields of education and design. She graduated from Presidio School of Management with an MBA in sustainable business, and is excited about Neighborhood Fruit's ability to create fair access to healthy food for all people. When she's not working, she likes to write and draw comic books and ride her Elektra Coaster 7 over big hills.
Oriana (Sarac) Tiell Technology and Operations
Oriana was born in Sarajevo, and attended university in Prague and Ohio. In her roof garden, she grows catnip for her slightly corpulent feline companion, herbs, figs and peaches; she also hosts a bee hive. As a software engineer, she has worked for large companies such as WaMu, but she preferred smaller operations with local impact like Timbuk2. She graduated from Presidio School of Management with a MBA focus on Sustainability and is excited about leveraging technology to make positive impact on the environment and people. After work, she enjoys cooking, yoga and riding her Bianchi Volpe with saddle bags all over town.
Advisory Board
David Oppenheimer
David Oppenheimer is a Managing Director at Natsource. He works with equity investments and greenhouse gas assets, and with North American nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide allowances, emission credits and offsets, and renewable energy certificates.
Mr. Oppenheimer is a recognized expert in the U.S. Conventional Air Pollution programs. He participated in the U.S. EPA development of several of the rules which govern U.S. programs. Prior to joining Natsource in 1997, Mr. Oppenheimer was a consultant with MSB Energy Associates, Inc., where he worked with public sector clients on energy and environmental issues. Mr. Oppenheimer has a BA from Brown University in Religious Studies and completed graduate level classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nathan Shedroff
Nathan Shedroff is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and requirements and explores common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful, as well as related fields, Interaction Design and Information Design. He speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including, Experience Design 1 and maintains a website with resources on Experience Design at www.nathan.com/ed. He’s a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. He lives in San Francisco where the climate, culture, and industry make it easy to have an esoteric and amorphous title like Experience Strategist and actually make a living.
His three new books in 2009 include, Design is the Problem, about sustainable design; Experience Design 1.1, an update to his 2001 book; and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool based on his book that helps designers create more meaningful experiences. His 2006 book, Making Meaning, explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers.
Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999 and a National Design Award in 2001. He is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Art s (CCA) in San Francisco, CA.
Andy Volk
Working from a late-night experiment in creating a social Internet radio community while at Nanocosm Inc., Andy Volk co-invented and launched Live365.com in 1999, which experienced exponential user growth and went on to eclipse the number of stations in the US radio market within 6 months of the service launch. After joining Yahoo! to manage their first generation of streaming music subscription and community products, Andy's role expanded to develop and manage streaming audio/video products for groups across the company, including Yahoo! Entertainment, Music, Sports, and AT&T Yahoo!, and was tapped to manage the final construction, launch, and ongoing management for the first year of Yahoo's groundbreaking Video Search vertical.
Andy is the President and Founder of Downtempo, an Internet product development & strategy firm located in San Francisco. In addition to their client consulting projects, Downtempo is incubating their own in-house products, including Is It Safe To Visit? and Nice Tips!.
With over a decade of product management experience, Andy is also the listed inventor on 5 of Yahoo!'s online media patent applications, and was one of the creators of Media RSS, the web standard for rich media inclusion in RSS feeds.
Edward West
Edward West is the Founder and President of Mission Motors, manufacturer of the world's fastest production electric motorcycles. Mission Motors is dedicated to producing radically sustainable transportation that is on the cutting edge of technological innovation.
In addition to his work with Mission Motors, Edward finds great joy in guiding others to their fullest expression. To this end, Edward consults with start-up founders, works as a career counselor and coach, and speaks on the process of creating businesses and finding one's place in the world of work. He has a deep and abiding interest in developmental and typological psychology, Integral Philosophy, and non-dual wisdom traditions.
