Greetings! As we kick-off the 2022 Challenge, your Boxerwood project coordinators want to extend a heartfelt (and excited!) welcome, share brief introductions, and wish you luck on your way to beautiful compost.
During this past week we’ve met more than a hundred folks who came to Boxerwood to pick up their composters, scales, and pails. You all have braved the cold as well as rain, snow, hail, and high winds to get your equipment, and everyone arrived with smiles. What a committed and steadfast group!
During your composter pick-ups you likely interacted with me (Madeline) or my colleague Elise. We’re your composter challenge support team for 2022 and would like to introduce ourselves. My name is Madeline Fuentes and I have been working as an environmental educator here at Boxerwood since returning to Rockbridge County last year after college. During school I studied food systems, which means I learned a lot of fascinating stuff in fields like agroecology, permaculture, global food politics, and even farm management. A major takeaway from those courses was that a vital–and too often forgotten– component of creating healthy food systems is dealing responsibly with our food waste. I am so happy to be helping lead the Backyard Compost Challenge this year and to be working with you all to make our own community’s food system healthier.
While this is my first year helping with the Backyard Compost Challenge, it’s an encore for Boxerwood Education Director Elise Sheffield, whose grant-writing launched the project last year. The success of the 2021 Challenge (98% participant completion rate!) enabled our local municipalities to receive another award from the VA Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to purchase all the kits you now have in your homes. Thank you to the local offices of solid waste management and the cities of Lexington and Buena Vista and County of Rockbridge for their partnership and enthusiasm for this project.
Next week we will share what we have learned about you from the pre-project surveys and together we will start building up our composting community. Please make sure you have completed that survey (if not, click HERE).
Most importantly, click the green button below to access the simple data upload page. Thank you again for participating in this project. We look forward to the adventure ahead.
