Prefigurative Community Building (Part 33)
Returning to the Soil Together: How to Start a Community Composting Project Using Power With Principles
Composting isn’t just about food scraps and banana peels. It’s about returning. Returning nutrients to the earth. Returning agency to communities. Returning care to systems that have been designed to discard. When we throw food "away", to rot in landfills and emit methane, we’re not just wasting resources. We’re severing a relationship. Composting is how we repair it.
And when done collectively, composting becomes more than a process. It becomes a Power With coordination pattern: people co-stewarding the nutrient cycles of their bioregion. That means no bosses, no experts lording over volunteers, no gatekeeping of knowledge. Just people sharing responsibility, practicing ecological intimacy, and creating shared infrastructure for a post-extractive future.
This guide will walk you through how to start a community composting project using Power With principles, horizontal, participatory, and care-rooted. We'll include links to resources for each step and examples of existing projects already doing this well.
Step-by-Step: Starting a Power With Compost Collective
Step 1: Gather People, Not Just Inputs
Hold a neighborhood conversation about food waste, soil health, and collective action. Make it a potluck, or host it after a community garden workday. Use this space to name shared values, access needs, and ecological observations.
The goal isn’t to “recruit” composters, but to find co-stewards of a closed-loop local system. Include renters, elders, folks with disabilities, kids, and landless community members, anyone who eats, poops, and lives on soil.
Resources:
Step 2: Build Agreements, Not Hierarchies
Before a single bucket of food waste is collected, co-create group agreements. This includes decision-making processes (consensus or sociocracy), communication tools (Signal, in-person meetups, WhatsApp), and clear mutual expectations.
Avoid extractive volunteer models. Ensure contributions (time, access to bins, transportation) are rotated and equitable. Make space for people to opt in and out without penalty. And always prioritize care and accessibility.
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Step 3: Map Your Waste, Assets, and Needs
Together, map where organic waste is generated and where composting could happen. This could be backyards, school gardens, curbside pickups, church lots, or existing farms. Also map who has bikes or trucks, who can help design systems, and what kinds of compost (food scraps, leaves, manure) are available.
Start hyperlocal. One block. One church. One garden.
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Step 4: Start a Small Pilot Loop
Set up a small collection route, on foot, by bike, or by cargo cart, and a single composting site. Use a low-tech system (e.g., 3-bin hot composting, worm bins, or buried trench composting). Document what works, what fails, and how people feel.
Be transparent about the process. Invite feedback. Rotate roles. Avoid professionalizing or branding.
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Step 5: Decentralize, Replicate, Regenerate
Instead of scaling up, help others build their own loops. Share your process in a zine or workshop. Don’t become a service provider. Become a mycelial node. Compost teaches us that replication, small, autonomous, and interlinked, is more resilient than growth.
Resources:
Compost Power: How to Start a Neighborhood Compost Club (PDF)
Toolbox for Decentralized Organizing (Patterns for Decentralized Organizing)
Two Real-World Examples of Power With Composting
1. LA Compost (Los Angeles, CA)
LA Compost partners with churches, schools, and gardens to create decentralized composting hubs across Los Angeles. They operate through community-led stewardship, prioritize education and equity, and reject top-down service delivery models.
2. BK ROT (Brooklyn, NY)
BK ROT is a worker-led community composting project employing youth of color to collect food scraps by bike and process them locally. Their work centers economic justice, ecological repair, and neighborhood-based resilience.
Conclusion: Compost as Restoration, Compost as Resistance
Each apple core and wilted lettuce leaf that ends up in a landfill is part of an extractive cycle that treats life as disposable. Composting is our chance to reject that, to turn waste into nourishment, disconnection into soil, isolation into interdependence.
But how we compost matters as much as what we compost. When community composting is done through Power With, it models the very world we’re trying to grow: one of mutual care, shared agency, and regenerative culture.
Let’s compost together. Let’s compost capitalism. Let’s compost the habits of Power Over. And let’s do it not by scaling up but by digging down, together.