Throughout the past month, we checked in with our 2025 grantees to learn how their funded programs, projects, and initiatives are progressing – and to better understand the impact they’re making across Los Angeles. Now, we are excited to share these interviews, with stories of growth, challenges, and community transformation. [Find each of their stories here.]

LA Compost received funding through the LA2050 Grants Challenge from the Goldhirsh Foundation to support its decentralized community composting and STEAM education model, which transforms food waste into a local resource for parks, school gardens, and neighborhood green spaces. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation with their team.

Interview Participant:

Ryan Jackson, Executive Director

Olivia Salaben, Acting Development Manager

LA2050: LA Compost is building a decentralized network of community compost hubs that transform waste into a resource for local green spaces. How does this hyperlocal model help address both environmental challenges and inequities in access to green space across Los Angeles?

LA Compost: At LA Compost, our work begins with a simple but powerful idea: food scraps can become healthy soil. That matters for the environment, for neighborhoods, and for the food system as a whole. Los Angeles County sends an enormous amount of food waste to landfills each year, where it produces methane, a powerful climate pollutant. Our hyperlocal model responds by keeping food scraps in the community and returning them to the soil instead of sending them away as waste. Through a growing network of compost hubs located in places like schools, community gardens, parks, and farmers markets, we are helping residents see composting not as an abstract environmental concept, but as a neighborhood practice with visible local benefits.

That local focus also helps address inequities in access to healthy green space. We believe every Angeleno should have the opportunity to learn about composting close to home and alongside their neighbors, while also seeing the benefits stay in their own community. By enriching soil, supporting tree health, and strengthening urban green spaces, the model helps create more beautiful, usable, and resilient neighborhood environments. In that way, the work is not only about reducing landfill waste, but also about reconnecting communities to the land and building healthier local ecosystems across Los Angeles.

LA2050: Your work combines climate action, education, and community engagement, from compost hubs to STEAM programming like the Magic Soil Bus. What challenges have you encountered in expanding this model, and what early successes have you seen in shifting community behaviors around food waste and green space use?

LA Compost: One of the biggest challenges we have encountered is that while composting is an age-old practice, it still feels new to many people in Los Angeles. Teaching people why composting matters, how it works, and what happens when food scraps are transformed into healthy soil takes time and ongoing education. The scale of Los Angeles County adds another layer of complexity: communities are spread out, and many people are most familiar with what is happening only in their immediate neighborhood. Even as we have built strong momentum and a growing network of community composters, we see that there are still many new neighbors to reach and many opportunities to deepen public understanding of composting as both climate action and community care.

At the same time, we have already seeing strong signs of progress. The Magic Soil Bus has become an especially effective way to bring this message directly to young people across the city. So far we have brought composting education to places including a teen center, elementary schools, and even a dance studio, and in each case youth have responded with excitement to soil science and the idea that food scraps can become a resource instead of waste. That early enthusiasm matters because it shows how community-based education can help shift behavior, build curiosity, and make environmental action feel tangible and accessible.

LA2050: What do you hope to achieve in the last six months of the grant, and how can the broader LA2050 community support?

LA Compost: We are focused on continuing to grow both its educational reach and its neighborhood network. We have plans for additional Magic Soil Bus visits across Los Angeles and are working to expand its presence in the San Gabriel Valley and Southwest LA. These next steps build on a broader vision of scaling a community-led composting model that can serve more residents, nourish more green spaces, and help shift public norms around food waste and land use. Our long-term goal is an LA County where food is not wasted, but instead returned to the soil to support the next cycle of life.

The broader LA2050 community can support this work in a very practical way: by composting. We encourage Angelenos to set aside food scraps during meal prep and keep them out of the landfill, whether by dropping them off at one of its farmers market sites or using a curbside green bin. That kind of everyday participation is central to the movement. Fighting climate change and improving soil health are shared responsibilities, and our message is that everyone has a role to play.

Photo Credit: LA Compost