Reconnecting People with the Land Cultivates Leaders
At Fresh Approach’s Community Compost Hubs, composting is more than a scientific process, it’s a community practice led by local residents and many skilled hands.
The people helping run Fresh Approach’s community compost hubs are part of the organization’s Community Ambassador Program, which provides paid opportunities for local residents to gain professional experience and build skills in food systems, community nutrition, urban agriculture, and community engagement.
For many ambassadors, the program provides a pathway into careers focused on sustainability and food justice.
“Community composting also creates opportunities for workforce development in the green jobs sector,” said Fresh Approach’s Community Garden Program Manager, Vera Cordova Mendoza who oversees all programming at the East Palo Alto Community Garden.
L.A. Granados, who is currently serving as a Community Compost Hub Ambassador, facilitates weekly exchanges where neighbors bring food scraps and leave with nutrient-rich compost for their gardens. They were drawn to Fresh Approach specifically because of its community focus. Particularly, having grown up in the South Bay with Spanish-speaking parents. Their background includes nursery work, regenerative farming, and habitat restoration, but the ambassador role has offered a new way to connect those experiences to community engagement.
“I wanted more community-oriented work instead of profit-driven work,” they said. “Seeing this job, focused on marginalized communities, felt very fitting for me.”
And for many ambassadors, participants, and volunteers alike, composting and gardening reconnect people with a relationship that has existed for thousands of years. L.A. expressed that working with compost and farming feels like reconnecting with ancestral knowledge.
“I think everyone is essentially a farmer or a gardener,” L.A. reflected. “Humans have stewarded the land for thousands of years. When people reconnect with growing food or working with soil, they’re reconnecting with something fundamental about being human.”
Diya Baliga, a Fresh Approach Community Compost Hub Ambassador based at the San Mateo Farmers’ Market sees a similar shift happening among volunteers and compost hub participants in becoming more aware of food systems and environmental stewardship.
“Composting reconnects us with the cycles of nature,” she said. “It reminds us that waste doesn’t simply disappear; it goes somewhere. It encourages us to take responsibility for our waste and nourish the ecosystems around us.”
A Transformative Community Solution to Food Waste
“Community composting gives power back to community members by allowing them to actively participate in food waste diversion and climate action,” explains Vera, the East Palo Alto Community Garden Program Manager, “Compared to the enormous amount of food waste generated in the United States, it may seem small, but the impact is meaningful because those materials are now nourishing soil instead of being hauled away.”
Instead of hauling organic waste long distances in diesel trucks to large industrial facilities, community composting like Fresh Approach’s compost hubs keep the process local.
Last year alone, our compost program diverted over 10,000 pounds of food waste, that’s about five tons, from landfills, transforming those scraps into roughly 5,000 pounds of finished compost that now enriches local soils.
“Compost is essential for replenishing soil health,” Diya said. “It restores nutrients without relying on synthetic fertilizers and helps increase biodiversity in the soil.”
Healthy compost also improves soil structure, reducing erosion and helping gardens retain water more effectively, which is an increasingly important benefit as California faces more frequent drought conditions.
While composting is a scientific process, it’s also a deeply social one.
For many community members, bringing buckets of food scraps to Fresh Approach’s collection sites in East Palo Alto and San Mateo has become a part of their weekly routine. In exchange, they receive finished compost to nourish their own gardens.
The relationships that grow through the compost hub are especially meaningful for the many elders who participate regularly.
“There’s a lot of trust and relationship-building that happens over time. People help their neighbors by bringing compost buckets for them,” L.A. shares. “That sense of community care is really sweet to witness.”
Nourishing Soil, Climate, and Community
At its core, Fresh Approach’s Community Ambassador Program cultivates community leadership, environmental education, and green workforce development when paired with our community compost hub.
Food scraps become compost. Compost nourishes gardens. Gardens grow food that feeds communities. And along the way, people gain knowledge, skills, and relationships that strengthen local resilience.
For L.A., being part of that cycle has been deeply meaningful.
“Composting is something humans have done for thousands of years,” they said. “Being part of that tradition feels really meaningful.”
As Fresh Approach continues to expand its Community Ambassador Program and community compost hubs, those traditions, and the communities that sustain them, continue to grow.
