A Brief History of Gleaners' Harvest

Kenneth W. Haupt is the founder and Executive Director of Gleaners' Harvest, Inc.  He created the first Gleaners' Harvest project in 1985, when he was a pastor in New Jersey. Through this project, the congregation provided an ongoing supply of food items to three food banks in the area. At the creation of this website in 2023, the original project was still serving its neighbors after thirty-eight years.

Since the recent surge of inflation that began in 2022 has caused significant shortages for families and food banks, Gleaners' Harvest, Inc was created to help churches organize their members to gather food for their food-insecure neighbors. A pilot project by a congregation that worships an average of fifty-five persons/week, for example, gathered more than six thousand items of food in the first fifteen months.

In 2024, Gleaners' Harvest created a process by which some of the Growers from a Gleaners' Harvest congregation work together to increase the total number of gleanings.  They do this by recruiting and overseeing additional Growers from thier non-member neighbors and acquaintances.