The Speakers

Clarissa coordinates the Community Composter Coalition at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She will provide a snaphot of the growing community composting movement and the results of the 2022 Community Composter Census.

Kourtnii Brown co-founded and serves on the Steering Committee for the California Alliance for Community Composting. In this role, she is expanding small-scale composting infrastructure and training in low-income communities throughout the state. She is also a worm wrangler, soil slinger, and the Founder and Director of Common Compost in Oakland. Her on-site community compost projects empower sustainable resource recovery and improve local food systems in Alameda, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles counties. Before Common Compost was hatched, Kourtnii spent 15 years as an environmental policy analyst. She will be talking at the Forum on the Alliance’s work to launch 120 community-led compost hubs. On Thurs. at 8:30 am (Session D4) she will lead a panel on community composting as an emerging sector.

Kenny is a youth composter with the Baltimore Compost Collective, a local service that collects food scraps from residences in Baltimore neighborhoods. Kenny has been with the program for several years and is active in running the operations. Together with program manager Marvin Hayes, Kenny will share how the Collective is spreading "compost fever" in an urban, chronically marginalized community.

Kyleen Sanchez (she/her) is an Education and Outreach Coordinator at the NYC Compost Project Hosted by the Lower East Side Ecology Center. She is an instructor for the city-wide Master Composter Certificate Course, provides technical assistance to community composting groups, and enjoys caring for the office worm bin. Her most memorable moment on the job was organizing her first compost bike tour on Earth Day in 2022. She led a large group on a tour of four community composting sites through Manhattan. Kyleen will be talking about expanding access to composting in New York City through community partnerships.

YES Compost LLC is a small food scrap collection, composting and vermicomposting business based in Belgrade, Montana. They service around 50 businesses and 500 homes and collect nearly 10 tons of wasted food each week using a small box truck and a truck + trailer. Materials are thermophilically composted in turned windrows for 2 to 3 months and then a portion is fed to worms inside of a 1000 sq ft warehouse using two custom designed "Continuous Flow Through" (CFT) vermicompost bins. The finished products are bulk compost, vermicompost, worm castings, and composting worms. Karl has grown the business steadily with minimal debt and has focused on operational efficiency to minimize costs and maintain positive cash flow. Karl will talk about his operations and facility design for business.

Aramay is a worker-owner at Rust Belt Riders in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has held a collection of roles since 2019. She now primarily coordinates soil production, with special interests in practicing workplace democracy and finding the overlaps between collective power and decomposition. Aramay is driven to compost by the desire to explore networks of play and survival formed among flora, fauna, and funga. She will talk about scaling up collections and composting and how Rust Belt Riders has grown its operations.

Khari Diop is a 4th generation Georgia grower, a community garden educator, urban agriculture advocate, and food security/sovereignty activist. He is the Community Compost Learning Lab Manager at the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture in Atlanta and will share information on the aerated bunker compost system installed at the urban farm.

Van is a Composting Systems Engineer at Green Mountain Technologies specializing in developing appropriate technology for community composting and institutional applications. Since joining GMT in 2010, Van has sold, designed, and commissioned over 100 in-vessel systems. He provides design, engineering, and technical support for the Earth Flow and the Earth Cube composting systems. He will talk about the Super Cube design as well as making composting vessels out of reclaimed materials and incorporating growing food, art, etc. This is an open source platform for in-vessel community-based composting at the scale of 300-700 lbs/day of total inputs. His work is a partnership with GMT but also represents his own community service project.

Ella is the program coordinator for Harvest Cycle Compost, which is Groundwork RI's bike-powered community composting program based in Providence, RI. Harvest Cycle collects food scraps from all over the city via bicycle and processes them into compost, which is then redistributed to the people whose food scraps it is made from. Ask Ella about Harvest Cycle's past and upcoming evolutions, including the West End Compost Hub, which is a brownfield that Harvest Cycle is remediating and redeveloping into a medium-scale composting facility and hub for urban compost education. She will participate on the closing panel: Building a Community of Practice: Next Steps to Cultivate Community Composting.

Before founding Loop Closing LLC, Commander Jeffrey Neal, Retired, served a 24-year career in the United States Navy as a Civil Engineer Corps Officer solving complex operations and facilities problems by leading innovation and change for Navy and Marine Corps bases worldwide. He holds the Compost Facility Operator License from the state of Maryland and has developed curriculum and taught composting with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Georgetown University. He earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and MS in Civil Engineering and Management from UC Berkeley. He is a Licensed Professional Engineer, certified Contracting Officer, Echoing Green Fellow, and Bethesda Green Innovation Lab resident. He has been a vocal advocate for scaling up distributed composting solutions. He will participant on the Forum's closing panel, Building a Community of Practice: Next Steps to Cultivate Community Composting. On Wed. morning he will be presenting on Distributed Composting Systems Have Not Scaled: Why, Solutions, Benefits, and Shortcomings (part of the Compost Industry Expansion: Reaching New Markets session (C1).

Community Compost Co. is a women-owned business based in the Hudson Valley, founded in 2013. Eileen is a lifelong environmentalist and city planner by profession. She has worked in both public and private sector planning providing land use and zoning guidance to both rural communities and cities throughout northern New Jersey. Eileen has experience winning contracts with the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City and a few other communities. She currently serves on the Board of the US Composting Council. She will participant on the Forum's closing panel, Building a Community of Practice: Next Steps to Cultivate Community Composting.