How Community Composting Disrupts Big Waste (Episode 61)

We ended up meeting up and we organized what became CommonWealth Urban Farms, which was this hybrid volunteer nonprofit community urban farm where volunteers would come every Saturday. We would compost together, learn how to grow food together, and it was really that experience that I saw the amount of waste that was produced. We had a partnership with one local grocery store and we had volunteers that would come three days a week and we would process food waste from this local grocery store. Just seeing that amount of waste was really the impetus for low ground I thought, “Wow, this is so much waste from one store. We should knock on doors of restaurants and see if we can organize something to divert more of this food waste from the landfill and create soil that we could grow good food in.”

Then it increases the organic matter of your soil, so over time composting, adding it to your soil, adding it to your yard helps sequester carbon from the atmosphere by feeding those microorganisms in the soil. It’s like one thing that’s so simple that we can do that has so many benefits includes water quality, air quality, soil quality, plant quality or human health. It’s just kind of a no-brainer that we’re not doing this at a bigger level than we are.

Often that compost has the vegetative seed in it, which then grows and becomes this kind of vegetative infrastructure. These products are so cool and I love that a lot of what fertile ground is doing is partnering with other groups. Can you talk a little bit about your many partnerships and collaborators? We found that, surprise, small-scale composters are rooted in their community and they have so many community relationships and partnerships.

There who we bring our commercial scale compost to, we drop that material off with them and then they use that screen, that compost and sell that in the community. We have partnerships with local peace and social justice groups, we do Zero Waste Events for those folks. There are so many partnerships and friendships and people that we support. The local businesses that we serve in our composting service. When we’re on our social media feed, we’re often sharing things that they’ve got going on, but when we’re buying gifts for our families, we’re stopping off at Black Scintilla and supporting local businesses. Buying local foods from Urban Agrarian, Oklahoma Food Cooperative, other local food producers here in Oklahoma City to try to grow this local economy.

Give it away to a food panty, to a homeless shelter. Find community partnerships. There are people who are hungry, who will eat good food if we can just think a little bit farther ahead. There are Good Samaritan laws in place that protect folks who want to do good, who want to make sure hungry people are eating. All of these things work together, this big circular system of reducing waste, protecting the environment, building community, feeding people, creating local jobs. They all work together, and I think it’s a much more resilient way of building our communities, and of doing life together.

There are no technology obstacles to doing this. It’s really getting your local community to agree that you want to move towards a zero waste economy, or you want to recover food scraps. You want to do it in a distributed way. There’s a hierarchy, a priority of the things you can do. I think you’re leading the way in Oklahoma on how this can happen, and I hope you can spur many other businesses to do the same throughout your area and city, and hopefully you’ll be able to get your city on board with supporting your efforts. We have to take a break now. To learn more about Fertile Ground, please check out its website at FertileGroundOK.coop. When we come back we’ll dive into why Fertile Ground’s business is structured as a worker owned cooperative, and the benefits of such coops.

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So, Fertile Ground is organized as a worker owned cooperative. Explain to our listeners what a cooperative is, and specifically, what’s a worker owned cooperative?

We have a bigger network of supporters as a coop. When you just have one person who’s the business owner, they have their network of friends and family that support them, but being a group of nine people now we have a broader network of support when we’re trying to fundraise, build business. We have a lot of people supporting us, and then just the synergy of working in a group that’s building something bigger, that’s working towards a goal. The interstitial characteristics of people. When my motivation is done, I’ve got a teammate, a partner. They it’s like they are motivated, and it’s not all just about what’s going on in my personal life. I have the benefit of a team that can help build me and lift me up, and then likewise, I help build them up and get them going. That’s just a few of the benefits, but those are a few of the things that just come to my mind immediately.

We have a member fee of $2000 to join Fertile Ground, and we have a process for folks who join. You have to work with us for six months. You have to go through training of worker-ownership, what does it mean to be a worker-owner, and then set up some kind of payment plan for your membership share. Maybe you don’t have $2000 upfront, but you could set up a payment plan and pay that over a period of four years, and then you’re voted on by the members in the co-op, “Is this going to fit? Is this going to work?” Then, yeah, that’s kind of how folks become members of our co-op.

In other parts of the country, like in Flagstaff, Arizona, there’s Roots Composting, and that’s another whose philosophy is really rooted, pun intended maybe, not just making a profit but also providing an array of community benefits while making compost or soil amendments. It’s really been exciting to see the growth in this kind of business-entity structure, and the benefits that brings, not only to the scale of their community composting enterprise, but also the benefits it brings to the community in terms of community wealth. That’s one thing I want to ask you about is how does your work or cooperative differ in terms of the flow of money or building wealth in the community compared to a conventional business?

There are financing resources for worker co-ops. There is a National Cooperative Lending Organization that co-ops from around the country are members of, and they invest their money into Shared Capital Cooperative, and then Shared Capital then turns around and loans money to cooperatives that are maybe start ups or doing an expansion or doing a conversion, where employees are buying the business from their aging business owner who’s retiring. Then the workers can own and run the business. Shared Capital is an excellent resource. Check them out, sharedcapital.coop. There’s Local Enterprise Assistance Fund, the Cooperative Fund of New England, the Working World. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, they do grants around the country for worker co-ops. They have local grants, and then they have big national grants. We’ve gotten a lot of support through the local Catholic campaign here in Oklahoma City through Catholic charities.

There’re also crowdfunding platforms. There’s a lending platform that we’ve used in the past called Kiva U.S., and so you can borrow up to $10,000 in microloans at a 0% interest rate from people in your community and all around the world. Then there’s also a new crowdfunding equity platform, so folks from all over the world can invest in your business, and you can set up non-worker-owner class of shares in your company. One way of doing it, a preferred stock so that the workers retain control and ownership of the business, but folks could maybe pull their money out of the stock market, and instead of investing and hoping for a return of 10% on their investment, they can invest in this community-oriented enterprise, and they’re willing to accept maybe 3% return on their investment. They don’t get a say in the major decisions of the co-op, but they know that their money is going to something good. That equity crowdfunding platform is called Crowdfund Main Street, so check them out. Those are a few of the things I would point people to

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