Akirah Hlatshwako Ubuntu Permaculture Mission - Newark, NJ

New Jersey - August 2023

Akirah is the inaugural recipient of the Cary Oshins Training Scholarship. She is originally from the Kingdom of Eswatini in South Africa, where she started her own farm and partnered with a local lumber company to assist with composting their biowaste to help prevent pollution. Akirah now lives in Newark, NJ and runs Ubuntu Permaculture Mission with her husband. Their mission is to offer permaculture education that promotes sustainable lifestyles that care for people, care for the earth, and promote mutual share. Akirah shares: “I have a deep passion for environmental sustainability and composting as it is our job as stewards of the earth to care for the soil. Composting is a direct way to ensure the livelihood of our food systems and is an important component of environmental sustainability.”
Watch the video below to hear in Akirah’s own words what being able to attend the training meant to her. She even got to learn from Cary Oshins, who came out of retirement to be one of the trainers.

Ivy Beach
Warren Wilson College - Swannanoa, NC

North Carolina - September 2023

Ivy has had diverse experiences in sustainable agriculture and community enrichment that drew her to the COTC. Her education includes the Wendell Berry Farming Program where she majored in Sustainable Agriculture, and EARTH University which exposed her to many recycling and resource management issues. Ivy worked as a Garden Ranger at Grand Park in Los Angeles directing classes in urban ecology and nutrition, and as a Horticultural Educator for the New Garden Society at prisons in Greater Boston. She now serves as the Community Oriented Regeneration Effort Supervisor at Warren Wilson College, where she supervises a 15 to 25-student work crew and manages the campus-wide composting program. Ivy shares: “I am committed to the practice of regenerative agriculture and soil cultivation because of the power environmental health & food security has to benefit our communities and our life systems.

Cindy Zuluaga Jimenez
Takshanuk Watershed Council - Haines, AK

North Carolina - September 2023

Cindy’s composting journey started as a child on her family’s coffee farms, where she learned to set up layered piles for use as fertilizer later in the season. Her undergraduate education revolved around biology, and in graduate school she became a community garden manager, overseeing all aspects of the garden including composting. After landing in Haines, AK, Cindy took over the Haines Community Compost program from 2020-22. In 2022, the Takshanuk Watershed Council received funding for Haines’ first commercial compost facility, slated to begin operating in spring 2024, and Cindy was hired as their compost manager.
Cindy came to the COTC looking to master commercial composting techniques, and plans to apply the training toward becoming a Certified Compost Operations ManagerTM through the USCC.
Cindy shares: “Attending the COTC will ensure that I have the skills to be an effective commercial compost operator. Haines is a remote, rural town and hands-on training locally, let alone in the state, is non-existent. [COTC attendance] will allow our new compost center to hold training for future compost professionals.”

Christopher Trullaz
Table to Farm Compost - Durango, CO

Texas - October 2023

Chris first became interested in composting during a permaculture certification course with Keith Morris in Vermont, where a visit to the Vermont Compost Company got him thinking about how composting could change how we look at waste. Chris spent the next 7 years pursuing his dream of becoming a mountain guide, and along the way found strategies to limit waste and save food from the landfill. When the pandemic hit, he found work with Table to Farm Compost in Durango, CO. He’s now the full-time operations and facilities manager, and Table to Farm’s compost throughput has increased 100-fold over 3 years.
Chris shares: “Everything I have learned about composting so far has been trial and error. Being located on a farm, managing the inputs, working directly with local arborists and sawmills, operating in a small rural city, all has upsides and drawbacks. I wish to professionalize and legitimize my composting career path and participating in a course such as this one is a great start.”

Tumar Tolkynkyzy
Gumilyov Eurasian National University - Astana, Kazakhstan

Texas - October 2023

Tumar has been a passionate naturalist since her youth, when she helped her family grow their own food and recalled her parents explaining how organics turn back into soil by decomposing. In high school, she was inspired by teachers from around the world to become an eco-volunteer. She started encouraging other students to use plastic more consciously and collected paper for recycling.
After becoming a student at Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Tumar became aware of the lack of waste management infrastructure in her country. She was especially concerned by the amount of organic resources being landfilled, and resolved to launch the nation’s first composting facility. After multiple attempts at her endeavor, Tumar realized that although she was familiar with the biological process, she needed to better understand composting as a business. She was driven to attend the COTC and learn how countries with developed compost industries have found success. Tumar shares: “It's now or never. Now is the time for the youth to make a difference. To make Kazakhstan, and the world, a better place to live. I promised myself that I will make a contribution to the environment, raise awareness among my people. I will start and run a compost facility in Kazakhstan and make my country more ecological and sustainable.

Dearcie Abraham
Bio Waste Technologies, LLC - Pendleton, OR

California - March 2024

Dearcie is a full-time Agricultural Production student at Blue Mountain Community College, a food waste research and development intern for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the founder of Bio Waste Technologies, LLC. Through her LLC, Dearcie manages a fruit tree orchard on tribal housing public property, aiming to provide free fruit to the community while creating a safe, family-friendly space for learning, gathering, and harvesting. As part of her efforts to promote sustainability, Dearcie collects and composts food scraps from the tribal Family Engagement Program. She plans to expand her composting initiatives to include food waste from the senior center, longhouse, Yellowhawk Clinic community garden, and other tribal entities through her internship. These efforts allow her to gather valuable data and build meaningful community connections.
A proud member of the Confederated Umatilla Tribe, Dearcie is excited to use her COTC experience to support her community by keeping food scraps out of the landfill and promoting sustainable practices.

Travis Torset
Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe Natural Resources Department - Tokeland, WA

California - March 2024

Travis has completed the Washington State University Extension course in gardening and environmental stewardship, and then went on to receive my associate’s degree in sustainable forestry from Grays Harbor College. As a GHC student, he participated in an internship with helping to control numerous invasive plants. Travis is currently contracted by the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe’s Natural Resources Department to manage the tribal farm and assist with control of invasive European green crab populations, which become feedstocks in his on-farm composting efforts. He collects food scraps and landscape trimmings from the community and combines them with crop residue, green crab, and wood chips to create compost. The goal is to use this compost to amend the sandy soils being farmed and make compost available for purchase by the public.
Using experience from the COTC, Travis plans to work with the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe to start a small-scale composting facility to crete high-quality compost for the rural tribal community while also providing education and employment opportunities for tribal members.

Rutger Myers
Denver Botanic Gardens - Littleton, CO

Colorado - March 2024

Rutger began farming at Denver Botanic Gardens’ (DBG) Chatfield Farms in 2019. Previously, he had experience in small-scale compost through co-founding a compost program for VISTA Gardens, a 1.5-acre community garden in Tampa, FL. Seeing the need for a compost program at Chatfield, Rutger enrolled in Denver Urban Gardens’ Master Composter Program in 2020, and taught community gardeners in Denver how to compost on-site. In 2020, he started Chatfield’s compost program, which grew in one year from backyard-scale piles to producing roughly 30 tons of finished compost annually.
In 2021, Rutger was hired as a full-time Soil Health Technician at DBG. In spring 2022, the CO Department of Health and Environment and Front Range Waste Diversion awarded his program $110,000 to produce over 100 tons of compost per year in 2022 and 2023. He has since made Chatfield’s compost program an educational site, focusing on compost quality and growing the site through mutually beneficial educational opportunities. He hosts workshops with local non-profits (DUG, GoFarm) and teaches local small-scale farmers how to create high-quality compost on-site. Rutger’s goal in attending the COTC was to further expand his knowledge to grow composting education in collaboration with local non-profits.

Sydney Simpson
Scraps Mile High - Denver, CO

Colorado - March 2024

Sydney started her composting career in college by managing the compost program at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS, collecting 20,000 lbs. of food waste a year and processing it for use on the 3 acre organic campus farm. This opportunity helped Sydney see how important compost is to grow food, and changed her perspective on our food system. She currently works for Scraps Mile High, a small compost collection company in Colorado. Scraps Mile High’s hope is to eventually start processing their own compost, and Sydney attended the Compost Operator Training Course to help better their practices and allow the company to grow and expand in Colorado.