How else can I help the HCC grow?

You can give me money! I have a patreon account 🙂

But money isn’t everything, so more about that later.

First I want to stress that the HCC works because it is a community effort. As such it would be great to receive all different kinds of inputs from community members. Obviously there are the kitchen scraps, which are being turned into high quality compost, which will be returned for community use. But it’s not just about that useful product. It’s about waste reduction and moving towards a circular economy. It’s about working towards no organic waste going into rubbish trucks in Hackett 🙂

I have loads of ideas about how to increase the activities of the HCC. Some of these involve getting new equipment and I’m happy to invest in various items. In fact I’ve already bought a new toy, a pH and conductivity tester, in order to assess the compost produced at the HCC*.

I actually thought that one of the first items that I might need is a bike trailer, to handle multiple bucket pick ups but at the moment I can manage with bike panniers. This is due to the fact that many lovely HCC members are regularly or occasionally dropping off full buckets right to my door. This is fantastic! I can focus on monitoring and adjusting the heap while others supply the feedstock.

Speaking of feedstock, the kitchen wastes are a great source of nitrogen rich materials but we also need carbon rich materials like dry leaves, shredded paper (including newspaper) or straw etc. So if you’d like to either stockpile or supply some of these materials that would be a huge help to the HCC. Perhaps you have a compost bin that isn’t operating, or is slowly cold composting. If you can use this to stockpile some carbon rich materials I would be happy to come collect some of them periodically.

As I said above, the HCC is a community effort. In order to do some ‘community building’ I’m planning on hosting an afternoon tea get together sometime soon (waiting for Spring!). All of the contributors that I’ve met are lovely people. My apologies if you are a contributor and I haven’t introduced myself yet! But I’m looking forward to meeting all of you at some stage. And hopefully a bunch of you will be able to come to the afternoon tea. If you’d like to help out and bring along a plate that would be great, but people will also be welcome to pop in for a quick cuppa. The tea leaves and coffee grounds will go straight into the heap of course!

Another way that people have been a great help is supplying buckets. It’s fab to see these handy little plastic receptacles be continually useful, before they eventually make it into recycling. Reuse > Recycle!

Now onto the sometimes awkward topic of money! The HCC is my hobby. Would I like it to be a small business that employs an enthusiastic team to help me make lovely compost? That would be great. But I do have a day job which I like and the HCC is still small enough that I can manage both. It’s also nice to consider that people in our community value activities such as the HCC that contribute towards a circular economy. As another example, a good friend of mine was recently proud enough of her purchase of new produce bags from Tulgeen Stiches and Prints that she happily promoted them on her social media account. I hope that I’ve shown above that the value doesn’t always have to be expressed in money, but a few dollars here and there can certainly help. So that is why I have set up a patreon account for the HCC. Patreon is a platform for supplying payments to creators who make great art or funny comics or interesting videos etc that most people these days enjoy for free. Most of the accounts looking for support are from creative artists but also some educational works. I’ve contributed to a few educational resources in my previous work and I would love to construct some of these to promote composting and all of the reasons that it is fascinating and rewarding. For the moment though any monetary contributions will support the actual composting that is already occurring at HCC. And I will be completely transparent about where those funds are being spent.

If you’d like to see the HCC grow then please support me in any way that you can. It can be as simple as taking a minute to tear up some paper to add into the bottom of your collection bucket 🙂

https://www.patreon.com/hcc2602

*I’ve also looked into commercial testing for the compost, but I don’t think I can justify the cost at this stage, although it would be very interesting!

thanks for the scraps! – Brook