Lauren Click - Breaking Barriers to Composting, One Classroom at a Time

[00:00:10] Adam: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

[00:00:21] Adam: I am so glad to be here alongside Dominique, the sustainability expert. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and did something about it.

[00:00:29] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists, to activists. This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant some new ideas.

[00:00:38] Adam: Lauren is the founder and executive director of Let's Go Compost, a nonprofit focused on democratizing access to composting tools, education, and systems. She's a Mercedes-Benz BEVisioneers fellow Stanley 1913 Creator Fund recipient. and was named the US Compost Council Young Professional of the Year in 2025. She and her team have built one of the few compost focused nonprofits with national reach, offering free bins, curriculum and advocacy resources for individual schools and organizations. Last time we got to hear Lauren's journey into composting and how that got started and her values that shaped Let's Go Compost and why composting is a powerful love for sustainability.

So today we're gonna be talking about composting as a tool for changing systems and what it takes to build inclusive movement. 

[00:01:21] Lauren: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:22] Adam: Remind listeners, how did you find yourself starting Let's Go Compost?

[00:01:25] Lauren: Yeah, I was in my apartment during Covid and while everyone else was making sourdough, I was cooking away at a worm compost bin and now I'm here. So we started very small and with some of my own personal change goals. And now I get to help so many students around, around the country.

[00:01:44] Dominique: Can you paint let's go compost as an organization for us? How many people are a part of your nonprofit? Can you redefine a bit about your mission in case a listener has not heard the previous episode? And do you also have board directors?

[00:01:58] Lauren: So Let's Go Compost's mission is to make composting affordable and accessible throughout the United States. We leverage K through 12 public schools as a lever to create that change throughout the us. We have one full-time staff, which is myself. I'm it. We have about 40 volunteers on and off. I'd say 20 or so of them are more backgrounds. So they're helping us do blogs, research, photography, and then we have a lot of eager Phoenix based volunteers, which is where we're based, who love to attend our school garden events with some of the schools that we happen to support here in the valley which is always so fun to actually get your hands in dirt.

We have five people on our board who wonderful. We have a teacher, a cybersecurity architect who really covers all things tech. We have systems, managers. You can see the broader picture of how we fit into a large facility like a school and a district especially. And then we have a food systems consultant who works primarily with food banks and that has given us a lot of insight about larger food systems issues. So it's been really interesting, really try to keep the board as diverse as we can to have a lot of insight whenever possible. And then we have board elections in September. So if you're ever interested in volunteering with Let's Go Compost as board member, feel free to reach out.

[00:03:17] Dominique: And if someone's listening and maybe is " I've never thought about composting being relevant for my organization or my home", can you say How they can get involved or how they can think about let's go compost in their journey?

[00:03:31] Lauren: If you make food waste, which you do, composting is important for you because composting is the best solution to turning that into a valuable soil amendment that can help grow local healthy produce or trees or native plants, and there is so many end uses for compost.

But all in all, if you make trash, you are participating in the waste management system, whether you want to or not, and working with Let's Go Compost or another school garden based organization is really your opportunity to make a difference in not just your waste management system, but in the lives of a lot of children who will grow into big adults who will contribute.

[00:04:10] Adam: Can you paint a picture for us what kind of impact have you seen so far from distributing your compost bins? 

[00:04:15] Lauren: Absolutely. So we started formally in 2022. 

By 2023, we had one school. In 2024, we were at 111 schools. And right now we're at 123 schools. As of summer 2025, and we are onboarding another 79. We are in 10 states right now and we're adding another 5 states this fall along the Gulf Coast.

[00:04:35] Dominique: That is incredible. That's such a wide reach from where you sit. how are you doing that? How are you reaching all of these organizations and how are they finding you?

[00:04:44] Lauren: Definitely. I start my days at 6:00 AM. To be a nonprofit founder, you really have to believe in what you do. And it's a lot of reaching out in the beginning. So the first few years, every single weekend, I was teaching four free compost workshops at different community events, community gardens sustainability events, things like that.

I was able to really saturate Maricopa County. We won a large grant from the State of Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality Program which allowed us to expand further throughout Arizona. That allowed us to hit just about every school garden who wanted to also have a compost bin added into their program in the state. From there, we started winning a few national awards. I volunteer on a lot of different committees at national groups, local groups, regional groups, so the US Composting Council, school Garden Support Organization, so SGSO, there are a lot of farm to school groups that we work with. And then also I contacted, I think every single 4H group in the country that I could find.

I put in a lot of hours. I just popped on Hulu and Netflix and did a lot of research on emails and that's how I found 'em and then I also do a lot of webinars with larger groups. So we partner with pollinator partnerships, so pollinator.org on pollinator and compost intro for schools who are interested. And that normally helps us get a little bit of a larger reach in states that we haven't really worked with yet.

[00:06:07] Dominique: That's brilliant and I think, like you mentioned previously in our last episode, that you work in strategy which I think shows you've a really strong strategy around the way that you approach this, You're doing the outreach, but you're getting positive feedback. What is the gap you're filling for these organizations? What is the response like? 

[00:06:22] Lauren: We normally target groups who are already teaching sustainability in STEM, who have wanted to teach about compost or are curious about composting as an extension for their current school garden or school sustainability initiatives.

And that allows us to not have to fight against a lot of barriers upfront. Normally the gross factor, they're already doing something and they're growing tomatoes. Here we have a lot of solar power groups in Arizona, which are cool, that work with schools and water as well. And it's been a really easy in that we just compliment a lot of other nonprofits who also have a pretty, one focus for school education, whether that's rainwater harvesting or pollinator gardens. We, we just try to work alongside those groups and it really helps.

[00:07:05] Adam: What's it like to run a climate nonprofit compared to like a more traditional sustainability role?

[00:07:10] Lauren: Well, it's really stressful. I dunno if I would ever recommend this for anyone. I dunno. I've never been more stressed out, but fulfilled in my whole life. I don't know if I'm a climate optimist, if I'm being honest. So it's just such important work for me that I will, I'll die doing this because I just think it's the path that we have to continue to have a planet to live on which can be really stressful, right? I don't think people who are working in other fields are feeling as much impact this year as Title I educators that work in environmental education. We're hit really hard, but that means that we're doing something right if people are starting to push back a little bit. We don't see a lot of pushback in the composting industry, which has been really nice actually. 

[00:07:52] Adam: With all the stress that comes with it, how do you define success? How do you measure metrics and moments of what stands out? 

Yeah. Metrics are critical for anyone working in a business strategy. It's really critical to know if we're reaching our goals for the program that we run. We don't go after waste targets. So a lot of the schools that we work with don't have the ability right now to implement, basic recycling, let alone a very expensive composting infrastructure, whether that's onsite or offsite.

What we're really doing is creating a spark that we work with schools every semester to continue to grow their program. So the metrics that I track for programmatic success are the number of schools impacted, how many classrooms we have at each school, how many grades we have at each school, and then how many students are at the school, and then we always strive to support. 75% of the schools are Title I.

And you mentioned in the last episode that as you talked to people in adulthood who are composting, that it's across the board people who started composting when they were kids.

[00:08:55] Lauren: Across the board, and so I'm really hoping that. Maybe 1% of the these kids will work in the composting industry, which is fine. I don't need them to work in the industry. I just hope they keep composting once they go into college and once they, have their first apartment in 10, 20 years.

[00:09:11] Adam: What's some of the biggest lessons that you've learned so far as a, a nonprofit leader? 

[00:09:15] Lauren: One

 of the largest lessons that I've learned is to know your audience where they are, and for school teachers that is in a classroom. So understanding classroom logistics and the hurdles that they're up against is critical. Something interesting is that a lot of teachers want to teach about food systems and sustainability, and a lot of that work is done when teachers are not on campus or not with students. And so a lot of that work and education also has to be extended to your facility management staff, and that's your cafeteria and your janitorial workers. And if they do not have buy-in and they don't believe in what you're doing because that bulk offsite diversion of food waste outta school, which can be, thousands of pounds a week, will be done by the cafeteria staff and the janitorial staff who, let's face it, have an hour to make sure kids are eating food, staying safe, and not getting hurt, right?

They also are having all these tasks added to them and so ensuring that you're creating processes that are equitable is so important. And I wish that I would have thought to also incorporate cafeteria and janitorial staff into my planning from the very start. I think that would've really saved me a lot of time.

[00:10:30] Adam: What helps on getting them on board?

[00:10:32] Lauren: So I've seen in a lot of states that have mandated composting that they have done it without any type of education for students or staff outside of a simple poster that's typically isn't in English, right? A lot of times you have bilingual students and staff and terms like composting could be very confusing. From a translation perspective, and we've seen a lot of programs fail by not offering multilingual or bilingual programs. And we're really lucky to be translating all of our work right now into Spanish and hopefully French in the next year which is really expensive, but really worth the cost.

And another hurdle to getting the entire school on board is making sure the PTA, the PTO, whichever school, parent association you have and the school board are behind it. We've seen school boards say they don't want climate change taught in the classroom. And so I think knowing your audience and what terms make them uncomfortable, what terms they enjoy hearing, speak to your audience, go into your marketing brain, you're selling your program, you're selling this idea. And that's really critical because if you don't have parents on board and you don't have schools on board, they're governing organizations, you're not gonna get very far, unfortunately.

[00:11:48] Dominique: I'm glad you mentioned that like Arizona and your population has shaped your organization and I was curious to ask you a bit about how your organization forming in Arizona has actually fed into the work that you're doing. When you think about the ecosystem you built the organization in how do that has just played a role in the way that Let's Go Compost grew up?

[00:12:10] Lauren: That's a good thing to think about. So I grew up born and raised in Arizona. Love it here. Love the desert. I don't think I'll ever leave. It's beautiful and our weather has really changed over my past 28 years of life. It's unbearably hot now for most of the year, and it was not like this when I was a kid in the early two thousands.

And these kids don't have that opportunity. They moved most of our school districts to start in mid-July now, because the heat is so intense that kids can't go outside anymore in July and you can't go swimming. The pools are hot, like very warm water, which is insane when you think of large pools. How much heat needs to hit that to be hot?

Trees are dying everywhere. Our saguaros are melting. Every year, they just collapse and they take hundreds of years to grow. And so I think working in Arizona, seeing us get hit by this extreme weather event every single summer now is what has forced a lot of these cities here to enact very strong climate forward plans as well as the state.

And again, if you eat food, you're dealing with agriculture every day, whether you want to deal with it or not, right? Food doesn't magically appear at your grocery store.

Being in a area that so heavily focuses on prosperity and making sure that these houses that we just built will have people, living them in 50 years is really important because if we continue on the same path and we have christmas where I'm drinking a margarita by the pool, which is not normal.

And so our state leaders have really. I think seen that, and maybe they didn't start with believing in climate change, but they're like, oh shoot. Like how am I gonna get this giant corporation to move here if they're gonna build a $1 billion campus that can't be used in 50 years? That's a direct economic impact. And I, I think that'll work in a lot of other states throughout the south and the Gulf Coast especially.

[00:14:06] Dominique: It speaks volumes that the communities that are seeing the impacts of climate change first are shifting to prioritize that education and simply just like having to mitigate what's going on. But also extremely frustrating of the way that humans need things to happen in their backyard for them to hit home.

But that also comes back full circle to the work that you're doing of showing them this work can happen in their backyard and they can be a part of the solution just with the space they have. You started with an apartment. So when you think about your curriculum and what you're teaching people how to do and how to see this work for them, can you share for someone listening and they're like, "Okay, how would you teach me? What do I have to learn?" Can you give us a clue into kind of what the curriculum look looks like, how you approach this education and how physical is that education? 

[00:14:53] Lauren: Definitely.

 So our curriculum is 100% for free, so I don't mind sharing any of it. It's available for download. letsgocompost.org/schools. It's five weeks, it's scaffolding, and it's about one to two hours a week for five weeks. So maybe every Friday afternoon during the fall is when I recommend to teach it right.

It starts with basics of composting. It's grades K through 12, and so basics of composting. The little ones we've pulled, really fun clips. We linked to YouTube videos. I should, we do not pull 'em, no copyright infringement here on the video.

You have Peppa Pig who Compost, Curious George Compost. There's a lot of really great kid cartoons who at some point have made a composting episode.

[00:15:30] Dominique: I love that. That feels like the same way people like go back and pick up all the Thanksgiving episodes from shows and put 'em all together. 

[00:15:37] Lauren: Yeah, and so we have those listed for like your really little ones. And we normally start with that, they're, oh my God, I love Peppa Pig 'cause they're like five years old and we're like homegirl does this too.

And it's been really great for as we set the basics, what's composting? Very basic composting, and then you get compost, right? We're taking a banana peel and we're turning it into something we can grow more bananas with, like very broadly. Then we break it down a little bit more every week.

So wait a second, what happened to that banana peel? If I'm just putting it in my trash? Okay. What are landfills? What type of people work in landfills? How does that impact our planet? How does that impact people who live around landfills? I'm like, oh, hey let's research where our local landfill is. Super important. If you don't know that as an adult, please look up where your local landfill is and maybe also look up health hazards of people who have to live around those landfills or people who work in landfills, things like that. So more of an environmental justice perspective.

The week after that, what's a worm bin? We do a worm bin in class. So we tend to do small scale indoor worm composting that can compost. A pound or two a week. So we're starting very small, strategically small, to make sure it's very hard to fail because if you start trying to compost all of your foods from the cafeteria in like the backlog of your school, you're going to get rats and a smell and. Someone is going to be very upset with you.

Each grade has a different understanding of ecosystems and food webs where our food comes from where it goes. So each grade's a little bit different in that aspect. And then after that, they'll normally plan some sort of community project. Or they're A PBL, which goes into the spring semester.

We learned about composting and landfills. Maybe we'll do a cafeteria food waste audit, and a lot of our schools do that in the spring. That's where they can capture a lot of the data.

In the spring , World Wildlife Fund has a really amazing, again, free curriculum for this. If you're looking to expand your program in the spring, this allows the students to take their findings from their classroom lab with their indoor worm bin and say, okay, if I multiply that to my entire second or fourth grade class, right? How much food waste are we making and where is it all coming from?

So they'll divide out their plastic forks and their plastic spoons and edible food versus inedible food, which is really critical. And then they'll submit that data to us and we can help analyze it and say, "Okay, if you wanted to add in a composting, hauling service, this is how much it would cost in your area on average."

If you got five schools in your district to sign up for it, maybe you get a percentage discount. And that's where we take all that data from the cafeteria and we start working our way up into the district and really working more in a consulting capacity with the district on a facilities management process.

Some of our schools aren't ready for that, or their area doesn't offer offsite hauling and they are not at a place where they could do onsite composting, which is super common. 

[00:18:16] Dominique: And on that note, I think a listener can piece together that the worms are breaking that compost down faster than it would break down when it's absent of worms. But can you share like how fast, like what is that speed difference of if I did wanna have a pile of compost in my yard versus putting worms and doing it with your education? 

[00:18:33] Lauren: From a science experiment perspective, every factor will impact everything else. So it's going to depend on your moisture levels, what type of food you're feeding it, how many worms do you have in your bin, how big's your bin, how old's your bin, things like that. On average, I would say, 500 red wiggler composting worms can eat about how much they weigh every single day, which is really cool. But you have to build your way up to that. So I feed my worms like every Friday I'll dump in some food scraps, whatever I made that week. I'll put my junk mail on it. If it's not glossy, I'll shred that up, mix it in, add on things from the garden that I killed because it's hot out and then, continue going from there.

So it's a good method to see a lot of a compost or a lot of food breakdown into compost quickly during a traditional nine month school year, I would say. So it's gonna be a lot faster than a hot pile and a lot easier to maintain than a hot pile, especially if you're not starting it in July and you're in Phoenix, you're gonna wanna be inside.

This could be cool to do after Thanksgiving 'cause a lot of food wastes in the holidays. It's snowing in May. And so again, another really great indoor activity to do, keep the kids hands in dirt, screen free and see it happen a little bit quickly.

[00:19:45] Adam: Now when thinking about the change that you still want to create, what's on the horizon? 

[00:19:50] Lauren: Oh my gosh. I don't know. Everyone in the in the world a cup of worms for everyone. I don't know. So right now we're working towards 250 schools in 25 states by the end of 2025. That's like our big goal. We're at 123 right now in 10 states. We're adding on 79 more schools in five states by two really great funders who are, we're announcing at the end of the summer.

So definitely follow us on Instagram to see who those amazing people are. And if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I wanna get Lauren to the rest of her goal, please reach out. We have so many schools on our wait list that we normally have to close our wait list, and then I just have a giant email list of, "Hey, I saw your wait list is closed, but we still really want this."

The demand is there. We have so many public school teachers who want to teach this in their schools. We're just working our win fundraising every dollar that we can.

I think in the next five years, we're really hoping to see more progress statewide with large scale facility management solutions for composting for public schools. And that takes a lot of students advocating with their parents to their school districts and their superintendents and cities about these issues.

So right now we have about 15,000 students in our network who are very eager and love to send letters about worms and the importance of composting to their schools and districts.

And I'm really hoping that we can continue to press that forward, that composting hauling services are just as important as every other facilities management expense that you can budget for like recycling. It's so critical especially when you look at the decrease of cost for traditional landfill once you start diverting your food waste, because if you have a proper source separation happening in most of your school, you can really get that bin down to just about nothing. And it's almost entirely powered by students and you're using the facility that they're learning in as a larger lab to create this change. So it's pretty cool. But I guess in theory that's my, I don't know, my big goal. 

[00:21:58] Dominique: So what is it that you are seeking to fund in your process that would help you meet all those schools that are sitting in your wait list? And what do the funders look like? 

[00:22:07] Lauren: So I think something that we struggle with funding is that a lot of groups see us as a non-direct climate impact because they don't prioritize education. And then we talk with state agencies about the issues that they're seeing in their waste management streams is that there's not enough public education. And so our funders right now are primarily from the private sector. We're very transparent about who funds us. It's all available on our website. Right now we specifically are looking for worms. Go figure. We need a lot of worms to keep this going. So we're always looking for gift cards to different worm farms throughout the US. We try to buy locally whenever possible and really try to keep it as sustainably as possible. 

[00:22:46] Dominique: if you were to leave our listeners with one thing they can do today, what would you recommend? 

[00:22:51] Lauren: If there's one thing you can do today, one, look up where your trash is going, and two, just start to become aware of how much trash you're producing. Because I think a lot of us think a little bit better about ourselves and how much waste we really produce, but when you multiply that by the size of your neighborhood, the size of your city, the size of your state, individually, when we all change, we can create a very large collective effort. Look at, Starbucks removing their straws. You guys like, we can do it. We can make the change. And so just hold yourself accountable. I guess that's my one tip.

[00:23:25] Dominique: Put a bowl on the counter, and fill it up for one week and see how quickly you need a second bowl. 

[00:23:29] Lauren: And how much it smells. Maybe put it outside in the summer.

[00:23:32] Adam: It was so much fun to have you on today and talk about worms and, all that good stuff. Really exciting just going through all the progress that you're making with Let's Go Compost and kind of your vision for the future. That's exciting that you're able to get compost in the hands of so many young minds and, and across the US. 

How can people connect with you and be an advocate for you in this space?? 

[00:23:51] Lauren: Absolutely. So if you wanna learn more, visit, let's go compost.org/schools. We are, let's go compost on every single social media platform, and you can follow me personally on LinkedIn at Lauren Click.

[00:24:02] Dominique: Thanks, Lauren. This has been awesome 

[00:24:03] Lauren: you.

[00:24:04] Adam: Thanks for joining us today.

[00:24:05] Dominique: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories like Lauren's behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:24:17] Adam: You can find our episodes@thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website Our music is by Zane Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll dig into another sustainability success story in our next episode.