Compost Corps inspires youth to make meaningful changes in their communities while providing paid employment and job skills for youth who have little or no work experience. The main focus of the Corps is reducing landfill waste and improving soil fertility in our gardens. We regularly pick up food scraps from partnering restaurants with the homemade Compost Corps bicycle trailer and compost them with leaves collected from Portland yards at our Boyd Street five bin compost system. While doing this work the youth learn to work with community partners, creatively solve problems to improve the environment, educate the community on composting, and become self directed in their work.

Complete Compost Corps Application

Selected Compost Corps Accomplishments

• Composters diverted over 4,000 pounds of vegetable scraps from becoming landfill waste, instead turning them into nutrient rich soil for our urban gardens
  
• Composters constructed nearly a dozen compost bins and a compost sifter in Cultivating Communities urban gardens
  
• Composters designed and constructed a bicycle trailer to haul the compost in an environmentally sustainable way
  
• Composters created a hand painted banner that hangs at Flatbread restaurant to educate customers on composting and the Compost Corps
  
• Composters created educational materials on how to compost used at Portland Earth Day 2004
  
• Composters traveled to Boston to meet other youth at a conference on the youth agriculture movement
  
• Composters wrote a successful grant to attend workshops at Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on composting and community building.

Compost Corps is made possible by a gift from Flatbread Company.

Additional restaurants who would like to participate should contact program coordinator Kae Bosman-Clark.