Please check out these wonderful recipients of our donation program. These are organizations who are making a difference (and lots of compost) in their communities!

 

La Semilla Food Center

La Semilla Food Center is situated in Southern New Mexico, and works to connect the community to healthy food and healthy life choices. This is not doing the organization justice because it does so much in the region. My part in the organization is helping to build school gardens, which includes us building them a 3 stage compost bin. This tool would be a great asset to our organizations during workshops to show how to till and mix the compost, and if the schools like them we can order more!

https://www.lasemillafoodcenter.org

 

Community Gardens of Santa Clarita

The Community Gardens of Santa Clarita are located in Santa Clarita, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles. We are approaching our 5-year anniversary on May 20, 2016. We have had an active Compost Committee since our inception. Initially we started out with 9 3x3x3 compost bins and after a garden expansion, we added an additional 3 bins as an Eagle Scout project. We currently have 12 bins in use with lots of activity as we are a year-round garden. We are a non-profit organization whose mission is to create a community facility where individuals can come together to promote the benefits of locally grown, organic food that is environmentally friendly, sustainable, and cost effective and which delivers economic, health and educational benefits to a wide array of residents in the Santa Clarita Valley. Our community Garden workdays see a lot of activity at our compost bins and your product would make turning of the bins go much faster. We also think it would be useful for our Children's Education Programs, which typically include a trip to the compost bins to see how they work.

http://www.communitygardensofsantaclarita.org

 

Sustainable Development Civic Garden Project at Appalachian State University

Are your cranks heavy duty enough to use in large compost bins (for example, those that are made with pallets)? Thanks! This garden is maintained by me and my interns, along with several classes who volunteer. It provides raised beds at no cost for students, faculty, staff, and community members of Boone, NC to grow their own organic food in the summer. Our funding for supplies is strictly by my own fundraising efforts (plant sales, bake sales, begging (ha!), etc.), so a donation of such a wonderful tool would be fantastic. Let me know what I need to do to help our garden qualify.

 

UCCE Sacramento County Master Gardeners

I am a new addition to the Master Gardeners of Sacramento (class of 2015) and a member of the Compost Team. We go out into the community teaching composting classes all over Sacramento County at public libraries, garden clubs, elementary school garden programs, community gardens, The CA State Fair, etc, as well as, at our "home" garden, The Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, where we hold monthly workshops and demonstrations. At the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center we keep a variety of teaching compost piles (that we turn manually with a pitchfork). After many hours of research, I have decided to purchase one of your Compost Cranks for personal use with my GeoBin and I couldn't help but imagine how nice it would be to have one for our team to use (and demo) at our classes!? We currently have a program with GeoBin where we give away a handful of GeoBins at every monthly Open Garden demonstration, so long as they attend one of our presentations, and I know many of our attendees have gone on to purchase more GeoBins on their own. I imagine the public seeing us work with a compost crank would stir up much interest in your products. Please consider us as a recipient. Thank you !!!! (I'm loving my personal compost crank--very easy to use!)

 

Oakwood Friends School

Oakwood Friends is a grades 6-12 boarding and day school in Poughkeepsie, NY. Their compost bin gobbled up 2558.8 lbs of food scraps from their very own cafeteria! From large gardens they collect fresh eggs, potatoes, different kinds of lettuce, bok choy, kale, and peas. Best of all, these crops get made into delicious meals served in the cafeteria. That's some cycle! With this donation they'll get compost quicker, and save on fertilizer!

Check out their garden blog: https://ofsgarden.wordpress.com

 

Ahwatukee Community Garden Project

The Ahwatukee Community Garden Project is located in Phoenix, AZ. We have been making our own compost since our inception, nearly 4 years ago. Our produce is healthy and abundant thanks to our rich soil, that is 100% native soil and compost. We have not needed to use any fertilizer or pesticide (organic or otherwise) in our garden beds, and neighbors marvel at our success in making the desert bloom. We've been using a pitchfork to turn our compost. Recently, Ryan Wood of Watershed Management recommended your product, and one of our members ordered one for his home use. He's sold on it already and brought it to us to try. Now we want one, too. So I'm ordering one for us. But we have six compost bins, so with a few more, we could put more gardeners to work on compost turning, especially adults and children who come to the garden for the first time, as your tools are so easy to use.

http://acgarden.org

 

Ethel A. Jacobsen Elementary School Garden

Students at Surf City, New Jersey's Ethel Jacobsen do more than grow food in the garden; they learn about pollinators, create special garden-inspired art, explore differences between fiction and non-fiction in literature, and get to know their palate by taste testing the delicious things they grow. Now they'll be using our tools to dig a deeper understanding of the healthy soil that feeds us! Their blog is fun, and a highly recommended read, especially for teachers interested in adding a garden-oriented curriculum! http://www.digginginthedirt.org/Pages/default.aspx

 

Davis Bilingual Magnet Elementary School

Davis Bilingual in Tucson, Arizona has a community garden just off of school grounds. Teachers take children there each day to learn all about the plants they grow as an extension of their in-class studies. At the garden, is a large compost bin, and on school property is a site for expansion of the garden where a single bin is set up. Below is a neat video from early on in their program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3GD3n1GupQ

 

City of Sacramento Community Gardens

The City of Sacramento,  California's state capitol, located in the northern Central Valley where the Sacramento River and the American River meet, operates a stunning 13 permanent community gardens, with on average 23 plots each (at least 6, and at most 50). Five of which are accessible to the disabled of Sacramento. Find the one nearest you!

http://www.cityofsacramento.org/ParksandRec/Parks/Specialty-Parks/Community-Gardens

 

Food Is Free Project A project born in Austin, Texas, the Food is Free Project teaches people how to grow food, compost with their neighbors, share the harvest, and build community. They recently open-sourced the project, sharing their story of upcycling wooden pallets, and lining 19 of the 30 houses on their block with front yard gardens. Now over 280 cities around the world are starting Food is Free Projects!

http://foodisfreeproject.org

 

The Woodlands Township

The Woodlands Township, in Woodlands, Texas, is a nonprofit organization, providing free hands-on outdoor demonstration composting classes through its Environmental Services division. Each month from October through March, the Montgomery County Master Gardener Association leads the demonstration offered by Master Gardeners, who are composting experts.

http://www.thewoodlandstownship-tx.gov/index.aspx?NID=547

 

Farmers Branch Texas Community Garden

This bustling garden features 14 to 18 compost bins, and 60 plots measuring 20'X4'. All the compost they make goes into the plots to maintain soil health. On top of providing food for its participants, food grown there also goes to their local food bank, in the form of donations, two times per week!

http://www.farmersbranchtx.gov/index.aspx?NID=158

 

Inner City Youth Alive

Gem Lake Wilderness Camp is a ministry of Inner City Youth Alive in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and features a one to one camp to staffer ratio. Kids from the inner city experience the beauty of this remote island camp. They have composting toilets, in addition to, a separate bear-proof island for their kitchen-waste compost bins. Staff hear about struggles in the kids' lives and become mentors to them.

http://www.icya.ca/ https://www.facebook.com/InnerCityYouthAlive?fref=ts

 

Jim and Betty Holmes Food Bank Garden

This remarkable organization boasts roughly 200 volunteers, who devote their time to growing food that supports the Second Harvest Food Bank in northwestern North Carolina. In 2014, they grew and harvested a staggering 7,384 pounds of produce! This food goes toward children’s centers, seniors, and homeless shelters, to name a few.

https://jimandbettyholmesfoodbankgarden.shutterfly.com/

 

Mill City Grows - Rogers School

Mill City Grows is a young urban agriculture initiative that fosters food justice in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, through community gardens, school-based gardens, and urban farm sites. We provide outdoor education via gardens at five schools and are expanding to three more in the spring, including the Rogers STEM Academy. The Rogers is a brand new, public K-4 school focused on scientific inquiry and exploration. Like the city of Lowell, the school has rich cultural and ethnic diversity, and the student body is made up of many new immigrants. The school garden will provide a hands-on outdoor learning environment where students can explore simple machines, new flavors, and their local ecosystem. It is an environment that draws out strengths and forms of expression that do not always come out in the classroom, and is particularly rich for students learning English.

http://www.millcitygrows.org/partner-school-gardens/

 

GRASacramento (ReSoil Sacramento)

This community compost network is a pedal-powered program that collects food scraps from F2F (Farm to Fork) restaurants and diverts them to the soils of local gardens and urban farms. They send up to 1 ton of organic vegetable scrap to local farms and community gardens. Their 'closed loop' system returns the organic nutrients back to their very source, aiming to make it self-sustaining.

http://www.GRASacramento.org https://www.facebook.com/ReSoilSacramentoProject?fref=ts

 

Tucson Organic Gardeners, St. Mark's Church, Tucson, Arizona

The Tucson Organic Gardeners, a 40 year old club, has been supporting public education on both organic gardening and compost making through public classes - all of which are now free - and participation in several local Green Festivals every year. In addition, we offer monthly meetings at which a speaker presents how-to information about some aspect of gardening. With our long history we have touched thousands of people in the Tucson community.

www.tucsonorganicgardeners.org

 

Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church Community Garden, Houston, Texas

www.bauucgarden.org 

 

Seedleaf, Lexington, Kentucky

www.seedleaf.org 

 

Solana Center for Environmental Innovation, Encinitas, California

www.solanacenter.org 

 

Neighborhood Backyard Gardening Program at their historic home in Gloucester, Massachusetts 

"The composting tool does a wonderful job and lasts and lasts even in our New England climate." (our family)

 

S.A.V.E. Society of Advocates and Volunteers for the Environment located in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

facebook/S.A.V.E. Society of Advocates and Volunteers for the Environment 

 

EAS+Y and the Evergreen Community Garden located in Evergreen, Colorado

www.evergreeneasy.org 

 

EcoStation: NY, Brooklyn, New York for their Bushwick Campus Farm and Farm-In-The-Sky Programs

www.ecostationny.org 

 

462 Halsey Community Gardens, Brooklyn, New York

facebook.com/462Halsey

 

PS 9 Naples Street Elementary School, Staten Island, New York

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for participating and sharing their passions! And thank you for the good work that you do!  

www.ps9si.org