Proposal: SoilCycle

Groundwork Somerville

Describe your idea.
SoilCycle is a community composting initiative run by Groundwork Somerville’s youth employees that reduces waste and encourages environmental stewardship. The project provides a youth-led, bike-powered, eco-friendly waste management option for residences and small businesses in the city of Somerville through weekly pickups of their compostable materials. The finished compost is then used to build soil fertility in Groundwork's seven schoolyard gardens. As part of Groundwork Somerville’s green job employment initiatives, SoilCycle creates opportunities for Somerville youth to gain leadership and entrepreneurial skills while learning the basics of small business management.

How will you use your grant?
SoilCycle’s success requires a management team with even further knowledge and skill in the area effective compost management. We seek to provide opportunities for a core team of leaders in the SoilCycle project to attend an in-depth training in this area. Growing Power in Milwaukee is widely considered a national leader in urban composting initiatives. They provide regular trainings to help build projects like ours “from the ground up.” We hope to send three to four representatives from the SoilCycle team. Including workshop fees and the costs of travel to Milwaukee, the total budget for this effort would certainly exceed the award that Feast Mass could provide. Receiving funding from Feast would allow us to cover the travel expenses for two team members to attend this workshop. In addition, we feel strongly receiving the sizeable sum of $500 towards this endeavor would be able to significantly kickstart our fundraising efforts to make this training a reality. The mayor of the City of Somerville has already expressed an interest in supporting our team to visit Growing Power as part of cultivating urban agriculture in Somerville. We feel that securing matching funds from another source would greatly increase the speed at which we are able to garner the additional support necessary to see this effort through.

What is the expected status of your project by the next Feast?
In twelve weeks, we hope that we will be able to secure all the funding necessary to support the project by tapping into Groundwork’s strong and extensive network of community connections. Our aim is to attend the Growing Power training on February 12th-13th. We look forward to back the learning we do in Milwaukee with the Feast Mass community shortly thereafter.