On November 7, 2019, a dozen or so of us enjoyed a potluck dinner with Barbara Grimm, principal of Davidson River School, at the school. Barb worked with us on our Use Food Scraps Symposium in March and recently reached out and asked us to visit the school to help them find ways to reduce their waste. What a beautiful school. There were definitely some conversations about how nice it is.
As always, we enjoyed a wonderful meal. As always, we brought our own non-disposable place settings and left no clean-up for our host.
We enjoyed listening to Barb as she explained the climate change curriculum the school was teaching in December. She asked us for help and ideas for next steps towards waste reduction. Our members were full of great ideas. The school recently received a grant for a greenhouse and we discussed ways they could divert their food scraps to a compost facility, we could help them construct. We have done a few in the community and we have gotten pretty quick at putting them together.
We also discussed connecting to the neighborhood pig and chicken farm around the corner and finding ways to share food scraps with them.
We talked about touring the biochar facility in Hendersonville so that students could learn that food diversion is its own industry and creates jobs and products. We suggested the students do an audit of the trash in the school. This would help them identify their greatest waste item and help them focus on what changes would have the greatest impact. Barb even suggested a competition to see what class could produce the least amount of waste. Ideas were plentiful and I was grateful to be a part of the conversation.
Su stated that Moving to Conservers is here to help and to let us know what we could do. It was wonderful. Thanks to everyone who shared and thanks to Barb for inviting us and hosting us. It is exciting to be working with a local school towards moving our community to zero-waste.
