Self-Reliance & Transformation Through Composting (feat. Terra Nova Compost) – Episode #1

This podcast is the first in a special promo series for the fifth annual Cultivating Community Composting Workshop and Forum in Atlanta in January of 2018, sponsored by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and BioCycle Magazine. Register and learn more at ilsr.org/ccc-2018. That’s ilsr.org/ccc-2018. Be sure to rate this podcast on iTunes or wherever you receive your podcasts. It helps us to continue to create great content for you, such as ISLR’s other podcasts, Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and Community Broadband Bits. Finally, be sure to visit ilsr.org for the latest on our work in all sectors of community development and now, here’s Corinne.

Sitting here with Corinne Coe of Terra Nova Compost from Atlanta, Georgia, and just say hi. 

I started Terra Nova Compost in October 2013 after being in Atlanta for about six months. Terra Nova compost is exclusively an education and consulting organization. We are for-profit, and what we do is teach people how to compost, either at home, in their schools, in their community gardens, even on urban farms. I’ve certainly worked with some farmers, who either have existing compost systems or want to start them, want to improve them. Farmers are very busy, and so some farmers just need a little bit of support.

In 2016, I led the first national replication of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Neighborhood Soil Rebuilders Program in Atlanta. I called it the Community Compost Advocate Training Program. It ran for three consecutive weekends. I had 16 students and four children tagalongs, and it was a total success. For sure, to date, it was the most, the hugest success I’ve enjoyed professionally and it was just so much fun.

My students now, those 16 people, some of them are working together so we have now 10 community composting projects in four of Atlanta’s five metropolitan counties. I am tracking their progress and helping them, offering technical support, offering emotional support, whatever kind of support I can give. I’m proud to say that I really believe that all of my students got something big out of the program. Each of them perhaps something different, but it was really, it was really fantastic.

I did it in Candler Park, a really fantastic older neighborhood in Atlanta at a community-owned land trust, which is really fantastic because it’s a permanent land trust, nature preserve, community garden, public space. The bin that we build, the three bin system will be there for perpetuity. It’s a really fantastic bin, designed by Urban Farm Plans, I’m proud to say.

The role of the NSR program is to get people excited, to get people enthusiastic, to start the conversation, and probably to some degree to get some money. I mean, again I have a for-profit business, but I’ll tell you that teaching composting doesn’t yet pay the bills for me, for sure. That’s not why I do it of course, and the West Side Compost Project will be a non-profit, I won’t make any money off of that. Terra Nova Compost won’t make any off of that. But, because of the success that we had with the NSR replication, I feel like I have the leverage to start this new project and I have a really great, strong board of directors, and hopefully get some funding to build infrastructure on the west side of Atlanta, so that perhaps we could do another NSR replication in a year or two.

On top of that, I actually added into my program, a compost entrepreneurship portion, which was led by Chris Cano of Gainesville Compost and Bike Compost, also a friend of mind, and a social justice piece that was led by Sundiata Ameh-El of Tallahassee, Florida and his project is called Compost Community, and that was really important for me, because to go back to what I said about what the power of composting is, I really do believe it’s about transformation.

Working in underserved neighborhoods, I want to show people that anything is possible, right? We can create abundance out of almost nothing, and almost without any money at all. We just need to do it together, to be patient, to do the work. I’m really proud of the group of instructors that I chose. In some ways, they chose me, ILSR chose them, but I added to that mix and what I would, what I envision, long-term, that this program either leads into, feeds into, becomes whatever, something like the nation-wide Master Gardener Program that is in almost every county, in every state, across the whole country. It’s led by really skilled, knowledgeable people, right, and they’re knowledgeable about horticultural, agriculture, and I think that we need to grow that.

In five years, do I want to have Rhonda, and Benny, and Linda, and Eriks come down to Atlanta again? The answer is no. As much as I love them, I want them to come stay with me, go out for Mexican food, but we need to grow soil scientists, we need to grow composters, and we need to do that locally. I think that the more we’re able to replicate this program and honestly, in the same city, over and over again, to bring more people into the fold, we won’t have to use fossil fuels to move people to share the knowledge.

I’d be remiss, because I do work for all the ILSR initiatives, to not talk about the economic development potential and to talk about how, this isn’t just about training folks to get more connected to the soil, to be able to kind of do those types of things. It’s also about building wealth in communities that have been sapped of wealthy, due to a variety of circumstances. I know, I’ll have you repeat a little bit of what you said in a panel a couple days ago, talking about why you don’t like the term food deserts. Why you don’t like some of the ways that we talk about these communities, because in a lot of ways, it doesn’t capture the full story. What composting, what community composting, what the work you’re doing in training and consulting can help to do to build that community wealthy, and that kind of underground structure of what a community looks like, that’s healthy, that’s vibrant, that’s doing great work for its people.

This work, I aim to show people again, the power of transformation, that they can take of themselves, that everything we need has been provided for us by some miracle of God, or Allah, or whatever you choose to believe in. Brenda talked yesterday about social economics, environmental economics and of course, that doesn’t boil down to money, but I’m sure, anyone listening to this podcast probably has heard the saying that like, “Once we’ve cut down all the trees.” I don’t even know the whole saying, but basically, you can’t eat money, right?

Again, this work is about transformation. It’s about self-sufficiency. It is about job creation and community building, that’s why I brought Chris Cano, up from Gainesville, Florida, is to talk about how he created this business to do composting. One of my students now runs a young adult environmental training program, that she works for an organization called the Greening Youth Foundation and they have a training center focused on young adults, focused on environmental issues. She’s now teaching composting in her program because of my class. Her volunteer hours are actually paid hours, but she’s training young people to do the composting. They get paid to be there at this job training program for young people.

I also think, I had a conversation this morning with somebody, with J.D. that was the moderator of the panel yesterday, that you were at, or Brenda spoke at. There’s room for backyard, not only is there room, these are all critical, and they’re all necessary. Backyard composting, community composting, industry-scale composting. We need all three because not one of them can meet all of our needs. We have to have all three.

It’s definitely something that where I know that, at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance we love the community scale, we love being able to do that, but something like composting is too important to just limit ourselves to one thing and also, realizing that there’s a lot of potential. There’s a lot of really great people who are thinking about this critically and how you can build wealth this way.